Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe

Lum’s been googling for World of Warcraft hacks again. From Gamespot, the down and dirty:

The World of Warcraft guild Overrated has been permanently banned by Blizzard Entertainment after it was caught cheating in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Guild members used an exploit that essentially knocked down walls, according to postings on World of Warcraft-related forums.

i.e. used an exploit that took advantage of client-side movement.

Well fucking duh. EVERYBODY, including my teenaged gaming neighbor Skippy, knows that WoW has too much in the client.

This is also a good reminder of a life lesson most of us learned in grade school: Two people cannot keep a secret.

And its corollary: There’s no way in Hell an entire guild can keep a secret.

6 thoughts on “Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe

  1. And what the hell’s the point of using hacks, anyway? That’s like picking up your imaginary rocket-launcher, blowing away an imaginary fly with it, and swaggering about what a badass you are for doing it. Wow. SO impressive.

  2. Movement on the client is pretty much a necesasry evil – good luck finding an MMO that doesn’t do this. Considering the problem and the type of exploit, this is the sort of thing we’ll probably continue to see in mmorpgs for years to come.

    The obvious fixes as options are:
    1) Forced progression via hard limits, like Domo/Rag in MC (boss 1 needs to die before boss 2 spawns or alternately before the boss becomes interactive.) Of course in AQ40 you probably couldn’t even tie this to boss deaths as the trash after Twin Emps is annoying enough that I could see some guilds just using an exploit like this to merely bypass trash.
    2) Bosses later in the instance have their loot tables tied to boss deaths earlier in the instance (sure you can kill C’Thun – but you won’t get anything if the other bosses are up.)

    Alternately you can do what Blizzard appears to have done – detect an anomaly (I bet they flagged these peopel for investigation server side when they had a C’Thun death without a Twin Emps death) then pull out the trusty ban hammer.

  3. Ok – lets say a lock and two players in your guild apply the hack – then start summoning. Hell, they’re bored of the trash. You don’t mind clearing it – after all, every instance since MC has been the same. Would YOU click ‘accept’?

    I can’t believe all 40 players in that guild installed the hack. Which leads me to wonder – did all 40 get banned?

  4. Knowingly? No, because I have a healthy respect of the banhammer and this would qualify in my book. As you are reaping the rewards of the exploit, you shouldn’t expect anything less than a ban. If someone used an exploit in the razorgore fight to bypass the eggs (like DI razorgore) would you expect only the pali that cast DI to be considered guilty? No. Either the whole guild zones out and waits on the zone-reset timer (about 45 minutes) to get a fair run of the encounter or they are knowingly exploiting even if they didn’t personally cast the DI that caused the encounter to reset without restoring the eggs.

    Unknowingly – it’s possible, but I’m pretty sure I’m not in a guild with enough people stupid enough to do that.

    For example – show up late to a raid – zone in – get a summon (granted this would only be plausable if you were around 3 hours late to a raid at best, anything less than that would be suspect.)

    Heck even if the teleporter npc wasn’t offering me a teleport, my first thought wouldn’t be “oh these guys exploited beyond twin emps.” It’d be “stupid bugged npc, I need a summon now since the trash in the hall to fankriss will have respawned, and even if it hadn’t what kind of sucker would run that far instead of getting a lock to summon them.”

  5. I forget where I saw the quote, but to an MMORPG developer, “…the client is in the hands of the enemy.”

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