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Left 4 Dead Bug Patched Quickly, EVE Exploit Takes 4 Years
Earlier this week, news surfaced that some savvy modders of Valve's Left 4 Dead were able to find a way to enable console commands (meant for the PC version) in the Xbox 360 version of the game. This allowed players to increase the size of their character models to ridiculous proportions, spawn unlimited weapons for themselves (or unlimited enemies for other, unsuspecting players), and go around the map deleting objects as they saw fit. A video posted on YouTube showed how to enable the commands. Valve reacted swiftly to the issues, releasing a patch to disable access to the commands a few days later. Several readers have pointed out another exploit-related story which broke recently; in EVE Online, a bug that was reported and went un-patched for four years has recently come to light, apparently responsible for the fraudulent creation of trillions of ISK, the game's currency. An anonymous reader says that (illegitimate) sales of ISK between players and farmers run on the order of $35 per 450 million ISK.
are more like "features".
I record my sleeptalking
Eve-online bug was reported but the GM that handeled the report mistook it for an other bug 4 years ago.
Some players kept exploiting the bug without reporting it again and its effect on eve-online has been "profound" according to CCP.
It is ofcourse impossible to get all the exploit-isk out of the game, we'll just have to live with it. Tech 2 prices are on the rise and the last 2 days have been heaven for market speculators, making billions on market manipulation (a condoned action by CCP)
It's a shame that game companies don't realize how much fun this is, and implement a game where the object is to hack the system to inflict grievous nuisances on other players.
Bad console players! You're not allowed access to the console! Bad, BAD players!
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Earlier this week, news surfaced that some savvy modders of Valve's Left 4 Dead were able to find a way to enable console commands (meant for the PC version) in the Xbox 360 version of the game.{{yea, why no? console commands are fun. Are console commands disabled on the consoles? aaaarghh...}} This allowed players to increase the size of their character models to ridiculous proportions{{WRONG, the player is on a unreal-style "roomsky". is like a skybox made of a real room somewhere on the map}} , spawn unlimited weapons for themselves (or unlimited enemies for other, unsuspecting players), and go around the map deleting objects as they saw fit {{cool!}}. A video posted on YouTube showed how to enable the commands. Valve reacted swiftly to the issues, releasing a patch to disable access to the commands a few days later.{{WHY?.. its like the "forge" that Halo have. Or whatever other tool to change the gameplay of YOUR server. More locked down, hum??.. no nice to play on consoles!!}}
-Woof woof woof!
if the xbox players where "accessing" the console, does this mean they all voided their's warrenties and got banned from live! ? =)
Valve patched this problem within a few days? How did they do that?
Players have been waiting for a patch for Castle Crashers for ages now. (The game is plagued by bugs that result in connection loss and even savegame deletion.) According to the developers, the patch has been done for a while, but the slow Microsoft approval process hasn't allowed it to get released yet.
What's going on here?
Half-Life engine uses a tecnique to have "3D skybox" using a special room where stuff displayed here show in the sky, so anything there looks gigantic.
Tutorial here:
http://www.moddb.com/games/half-life-2/tutorials/3d-skybox-tutorial
-Woof woof woof!
G'day, I'd like to point out that Valve isn't usually this quick. Take for example Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, the multiplayer component for the famous single player game. http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=248425 http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=76660 These two links list quite a few bugs. There hasn't be a decent update for HL2: DM in about 2 fucking years.
...patching the L4D issues on the online servers, but why must they do the same for user hosted servers or with system link?
As you can buy in game time for $35 and resell it for ISK at around the 450 million mark, I believe this is what the poster was referring to; this is actually a legitimate transaction and is supported by CCP (this is nice because it sets a cap on the price that gold/isk sellers can charge out of game and allowing indirect regulation). This exploit didn't allow the creation of ISK, just the creation of high end materials for module and ship production. While those sell for a lot of ISK, it is only other players that buy it so the net player isk production wasn't effected.
Why is this a bug? This is possible on the PC version but the server has to have sv_cheats enabled explicity... do XBox servers all have sv_cheats enabled or is this deemed a bug becasue all servers on the xbox are hosted by players which could potentially enable/disable the cheats to their advantage? (again the PC players could do this but sv_cheats change notifications are replicated to all clients via a text alert so you could just leave a cheat server).
As someone who played Half-Life and particularly Team Fortress Classic for numerous years and clans at a fairly advanced level (not to mention all the Quakes, Unreal Tourney, etc. etc.) this whole story is a gigantic WTF for me.
The ranting and frothing of the various console owners who, quite simply don't have a clue - or appreciate - what the in-game console is or does is stunning. I suppose it's kinda to be expected from not really having a keyboard to access this stuff but the responses from the vast majority are shocking (see the kotaku article on this:
http://kotaku.com/5106048/left-4-dead-xbox-360-hacks-to-ruin-everything ).
First off these aren't hacks or exploits in the traditional sense and generally can't be run unless the server owner has set their server to cheat mode on (console command: sv_cheats 1). The reporting of this isn't crystal clear in the Half-Life engine and can catch people unawares, but only the server host/admin can adjust it. I suppose this wasn't such a big deal back in the day when a 'server' was usually dedicated as opposed to the way it runs on todays consoles (the host player runs the server and plays in it at the same time). At any rate, I imagine that even on the Xbox only the host player can run these commands (or anyone with remote server admin logon). It's not like JoeySmacktard can join your game and use these commands without you going out your way to allow him to do so.
Secondly, this kind of tweaking is absolutely HILARIOUS (at least amongst consenting adults ;) ). I've some fond memories of many games and mods run on my LAN with friends running around maps in low gravity, movement speed set to several hundred miles per hour or friction set to be negative, throwing everyone all over the place. If valve truly has nuked these commands for good on xbox then I can only say it is a sad day for console owners of the game. It's a co-op game for god's sake, you're probably playing with good friends and once you've worked your way through the standard game such 'tweaks' really give it a new lease of life.
If these commands were left in without sv_cheats being the toggle and usable by anyone on the server - I will humbly stand corrected. But frankly I doubt it. Glad I'll be getting the PC version so that this sort of stuff is left optional to me - as it should be.
Maybe because hardly anybody plays HL2:DM?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I've said it once and I'll say it again. PC game developers are complacent about quality. Too complacent. There is in fact a culture of complacency among PC developers. Console developers by contrast, owing to many years of zero patch capability after release, have much, much higher standards and bugs, major and minor are not tolerated to anywhere near the same extent as they are in PC titles.
This problem has not gone away and is only becoming more evident as PC developers attempt to port or move into console development. Almost universally, they run into serious quality issues, allowing bugs, glitches and crashes to occur far, far more frequently that any console player is used to dealing with.
In 1995, I spent over four hours trying to get Discworld to run with sound on my PC. Last month, my brother spent over six hours trying to get Fallout 3 to even play on his PC. In 1995, every single game on the SNES, Mega Drive, and nascent Playstation ran flawlessly from the moment it was turned on. Today, that is still the case with consoles.
PC gamers can say what they like about games on consoles and the people who play them. But one thing they cannot deny is just how solid and reliable console games have been, and continue to be. You put in the cartridge/disc, and the game "Just Works(TM)" from day one. No patches, no bugs, no crashes. This is a standard which PC developers should obviously be reaching from, yet in over a decade, by objective measures, they have not made one lick of progress in this direction.
This complacency is what will spell the end of PC gaming if developers do not get their acts together. People are not going to spend four hours downloading and installing patches for games that refuse to work out of the box when consoles begin to offer those same titles, with the same specs and control schemes. People are not going to keep buying $200 upgrades just to turn something on anymore, when custom hardware consoles offer long term(5+ years) powerful capabilities in just one purchase. People are not going to put up with imbalanced, glitchy or hacked PC games for months in online play, when console developers aggressively pounce on issues and issue automatic mandatory patches within days (Many developers already do this in Xbox360(see article) and PS3 titles).
In short, the culture of quality in console gaming that the PC gaming industry needs to swiftly adopt.
May the Maths Be with you!
Eve Online's currency is Icelandic Kronur? No wonder they're in trouble!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
No, that's not it at all. I'm not sure how TFS ended up at that conclusion
The bug was a manufacturing bug, similar in some respects to an item duping bug. Certain types of production in EVE are multi-step processes where materials get made in to other materials before everything finally is made in to a finished good*. Players could build certain mid-process manufacturing materials (we'll call the fake materials [stuff]) without needing the materials/inputs normally required to build said [stuff]. This resulted in a lot of [stuff] being made out of nothing that was then used to build finished products. No ISK was ever created since this exploit created [stuff], not ISK. The exploiters could sell their fake [stuff] to other players for ISK, but there was never any more ISK in the game because of it.
Ironically this was better for the vast majority of players who were not in to manufacturing, since the deflation that results from the excess [stuff] meant they could get many finished goods for cheaper than what they should actually be at. The flip side is that correcting this means that prices on the deflated goods are about to shoot up like a rocket, in other words the game is about to hit a period of rapid inflation as the market corrects for the lack of further fake [stuff].
*Specifically, it was an exploit involving Tech 2 manufacturing. The production chain looks like this, and things that could be fraudulently made are tagged with [stuff]: Raw Materials -> Basic Materials [stuff] -> Advanced Materials [stuff] -> Components -> Finished Goods
I don't why they point to SHC.. which is just noise and no content. Kugutsumen is the place to go for EVE scandals. It's the only place CCP hasn't managed to censor.
EV0KE DIR: "Today I become freed from my chains in EVE"
http://www.kugutsumen.com/showthread.php?t=3428
In terms of complaints about getting a game to run 'at all' or 'with sound at all', that comes down to hardware complexity. No development company will have this sort of glaring omission on any sane console platform, due to the consistency of hardware in the field. You'll note also that PC developers have tweak-able settings for resolution, geometric complexity, etc etc, because they don't know what hardware they are going to run into. It's just that simple. Richer APIs have helped abstract the differences better, but they are still there.
I think the console development issues can be more attributed to the complexity of the platform. Frankly, I don't remember having to acquire many patches before the latter half of the 90s for PC games. Some of the fancier DOS games had issues, but a lot of the DOS games simply didn't have a lot to worry about.
Another complicating factor is the aspect of multi-player games. The mentioned bugs, for example, would not even be worth a patch if it were not a multi-player game. The multi-player aspect requires all bugs that must intentionally be triggered that can provide unfair advantage to be patched. You can find scores of bugs that were exploits in Console history. Final Fantasy 7 W-ITEM underflow bug and Wild Arms Item underflow bug come to mind off the top of my head, The vast majority of patches for modern games have fallen under this category, fixing exploits and fine-tuning balance. This goes for both PC and Console games. Take a look at a single player game and a multiplayer game in the current generation and you'll be hard pressed to find a multi-player game without patches, yet single-player games exist commonly without patches. Before the current generation, internet multi-player gaming on consoles hadn't gotten off the ground, so it wasn't as much a concern, while internet PC multi-player has been common over the last 6-8 years.
And finally, I have seen on occasion games lock up or just glitch in the console world too. Some games released multiple versions of ROM cartridges, and a publisher, if bothered, would exchange an older, buggy one for the new version. It was rarely worth anyone's time to do so, but they still had glitches that slipped past QA. Generally you could avoid them, but still.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I play the game, Eve and there's a bunch of hate going on for the developers, CCP as a result of this bug. I think the bashing of CCP is excessive, but it's worth considering why it might have happened.
First, much has been made of the claim that CCP "knew" about the exploit. Why has this assertion been made? Because the exploit in question was "petitioned", that is, someone complained about the exploit to an ingame admin some time four years ago. I gather this was reported multiple times in the same way though it's hard to figure out who's telling the truth. But what is the petition proces for? Resolving an ingame problem with a user. If the user is ok with the outcome ("I have free stuff!") and isn't currently cheating, then I gather the petition is closed. So one possibility for the failure is simply that the exploit never got reported as a bug either by players or by the admins handling the problems. I wouldn't be surprised, if the admins never bothered either because it wasn't their job (since the bug wasn't resulting in actions that required immediate admin correction) or because that part of the game was notoriously buggy.
Now as I understand it, the bug is as follows. There is something called a "player owned station" or "POS". You start by anchoring something called a control tower which for our purposes can only be anchored in a fixed number of spots, one per "moon" in the game (my SWAG is hundred thousand locations). Near that tower, you can anchor other POS structures. Some are for defense. One is to extract a resource "moon minerals". You can attach factories, drug labs, asteroid ore refineries. The most important structures are (chemical) reactors. You store various moon mineral resources and reactor products in "silos". The reactors take input products from some silos and dump the output in other silos. Think of it like a flow chart made of industrial widgets. There are two layers of reactions known as "simple" and "complex". Every moon mineral (of which there are maybe 15-20 types) goes through a simple reaction (where it is combined with another moon mineral) and then a complex reaction (where the resulting simple reaction product is combined with 1-3 other simple reaction products).
Economically, most of the value coming out of reactions comes out of the second layer of reactions. The reactors for complex reactions are bigger and most POS can only handle one such reactor. That often means that a chain of reactions can spread over half a dozen reactors or more. The really efficient corporations (Eve equivalent of guilds) can run dozens of these things to generate all the reaction products that the Eve markets consume. That's if you do it the fair way.
Eve like many such games has a one hour downtime. Some enterprising players apparently discovered that one can manipulate a single reactor so that over downtime it fills the output silo with the desired reaction product even though no input material was used. Normally it takes a week or longer in real time to fill that silo and you need to fill the input silos with the appropriate materials. The complex reactions, being the more valuable ones and the final product of POS reactions (which would immediately be bought by manufacturers), were the ones that were exploited. Certain moon minerals were far more scarce than others. In fact, it was to the point that a lot of the game activity centered on controling sources of those moon minerals. This was all bypassed by creating the complex reaction products that had the valuable moon minerals in them.
For your edification, here's a screenshot halfway down the page showing a control tower (the big vertical thing), a bunch of silos (9 of them present along with a "coupling silo" which looks identical, meant to buffer the flow of output product), and two reactors (on the far left), one complex and one simple. "Online" means it is active and able to do something. "Anchor
The decision to release buggy software often does not lie in the hands of the developer, but the business paying the developer. In many cases, bugs and vulnerabilities are well known, but a business decision is made to release anyway.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Just because it doesn't have 10 billion players, like Counter-Strike doesn't mean nobody plays it. http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ then click "View Steam players per game". As you can see, it is 9th on the list. It's definitely not unpopular! There was only a bug-fixing update a few weeks before the Verizon US$100 000 duel tourney. Valve have basically Left HL2: DM 4 Dead.
See Sugar Watkins
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(film)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
This is not a bug. Is a feature that all quake engines, a console to adjust some gameplay and functioning settings for the server.
Valve is removing this to make these people that cry "hack hack hack" happy, but this is like removing cmd.exe from windows because some people are scared at black windows with white text.
-Woof woof woof!
Your illegitimate isk sales numbers are nonsensical. The legal means of buying isk is cheaper. Why would you pay $35 for 450m and risk getting banned when you can pay $35 for 600m and _zero_ risk of a ban?
I find being offended by me offensive.
FYI - We're running on the Source Engine. The 3D skybox isn't really a room... it's just a hollow box covered in Skybox texture that's anywhere in the map outside of the bounds of the regular map area accessible by the players. Everything in the skybox is 1/16th scale to make it cheaper to render. The source engine scales everything up 16 times when it renders it as the Skybox. This is all from memory so I may be off on something slightly... I was going to link to the Wiki but it's down for some reason.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
models couldn't be resized. They were in the skyboxes, using noclip
Aley Tannes
http://code.google.com/p/firecell/wiki/FireCell
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
Heh, you've never played EVE, have you?
Quit that shit five years ago shortly after realizing that CCP had no incentive to fix the poorly designed interface and game balance... haven't looked back.
Had a lot of potential, but gawd, the implementation sucked.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
While the mechanics of specific exploit may be hard to catch in testing and production, CCP ought to run reports of stuff being created and destroyed in game universe.
It is not just a matter of some players getting rich through cheating. If such thing gets widespread enough, the cheaters will be the only players able to play. This would be a disaster for CCP.
If the bug really was reported four years ago, I hope the publishers of EVE suffer financially for their blunder. I don't play EVE, but I've railed against the bug reporting and tracking schemes used by other companies. Blizzard, for example, thinks that a Web forum in which 99.9% of bug reports receive no official feedback or acknowledgment is an acceptable way to manage bug tracking for one of the largest and most complex software projects in existence. I've considered setting up an unofficial Bugzilla to show the world just how long exploitable bugs in WoW go unfixed, but I'm afraid they'd consider it a violation of the TOS and track it back to my game accounts. If the publishers of EVE take a hit in the pocketbook, maybe Blizzard and others will finally wake up and get a fucking clue.