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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.
Bad console players! You're not allowed access to the console! Bad, BAD players!
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
English motherfucker, do you speak it?
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!
Market speculators in a game. It's a fucking game for c'sake, not a damn country/government.
To each their own. Some people like shooting creatures from hell when playing a game called Doom, some people like moving medieval armies around a chessboard, and some people like speculating in make believe markets. All of them are GAMES. If you don't like it, don't play it. I'm amazed at your delusions of grandeur that let you think you are God's One and Only Game Censor, and can decide which games are Worthy and which games are Not.
Short version: no one cares if you don't like EVE. Go play your shooter and leave us alone.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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
As the other poster said, Eve's market is huge. Ships, ammo, as well as lots of modules for ships (and lots of other stuff including *all* tech2 items) are made by players. The market is quite large so it's easy to do speculation, provided you have in-game money. The prices of the raw materials for tech2 item production are getting rarer? Well... that's going to mean the prices of tech2 items are likely to increase. So, buy a bunch off the market right now in the hopes that prices will go up and you'll get a nice profit, just for waiting a few weeks.
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