AO is pretty fun - A lot more complex than most ORPG’s, but definitely fun.
Stuff like this is amusing to me. It proves to me even more that Ubi/Wolfpack need to be beaten with the cluestick.
What server did the hacks take place on? I played last night and today and no one was saying anything about it and I’m bound to Khar, chat-cemtral of the game world. Oh well, hope Wolfpack fixes things.
It took place on Scorn.
mostly on scorn, there were incidents on War and supposedly other servers too, generally with the most impact hitting the ruling guilds on those servers.
How can any developer make such an elementary mistake? Wasn’t this lesson made painfully apparent to everyone after the original Diablo? I am amazed. The first rule of MMOG game development has to be “the client is the enemy.”
The most disturbing thing for me is the talk about suing the hackers.
Funnily enough, my next column for Game Developer is tangentially related to this kind of thing. Maybe I’ll stick in a few comments about the appropriate people at Ubi/Wolfpack being losers (the ones threatening legal action, I mean).
Why shouldn’t they threaten legal action? Not that they shouldn’t have done a better job, but I don’t see any reason to let what are essentially vandals off lightly.
If they’re hacking code on their own machines…how are they vandals? You don’t actually expect an EULA to stand up in court now do you?
–Dave
They’d be better off just stripping the accounts of those involved and putting in safeguards against GM clones in the future. I don’t think a lawsuit would get them anything but bad PR.
If you hacked your message stream to gain administrator access to the server I expect the EULA to be almost irrelevant…
In any case, EULA or no, the hated DMCA may also come into play here.
Maybe we can give a medal to the first MMORPG to fucking work out out of the box.
If you hacked your message stream to gain administrator access to the server I expect the EULA to be almost irrelevant…
In any case, EULA or no, the hated DMCA may also come into play here.[/quote]
How would it be irrelevant? I dont know the lawyer talk about EULA’s or whatnut, but what if this were Amazon and the hackers were hacking to get CC#'s and sold them? I know its a slippery slope, but what really is the difference? Frankly i dont care if they do or dont go to court (go to jail get bubba as bedmate etcetc), its just a game, but I would expect them to AT LEAST be banned from the game!
And it kind of bothers me that people think its not that much a problem that they hacked SB. Meaning, who says this won’t happen in WoW or SWG or some other mmrpg? Do you always blame the bank for being robbed (or being transported virtually to the ocean?!? bah bad analogy~!)
And then people defending the hackers like it some right-to-fight-for-our-right-to-play-a-non-buggy-released-game?!? Lets face it, mmrpg’s are and will be buggy/unbalanced on release. anyways, makes me think this genre is doomed to failure, due to the really hardcore players being babies.
just a thought!
etc
Well, they won’t sue over client-side-based hacking of programs, but they can and will do so over a host of other things that they can lay claim in more lawyerlike terms, stuff like denial of service, impersonating company employees, loss of service, loss of income, software and hardware damages, etc. I’m sure they’ll plop it altogether, say that the actions of these people caused a fundamental loss of income from that night, as well as in the long-term from player unsubscriptions, and sue for a large sum – rightly so.
Why you’d want to object to that, apparently being a developer (I know not Jason’s background), is perplexing to me.
If I ran a company that sunk say $10 million US into a massively multiplayer online game, only to see 10% of the user base quit because of a hacking incident that maliciously screwed the player base – the fact that the incident was possible really matters not at all, unless the devs blatantly invited the hackers to do so – I’d want to do a lot more than say, “Goddamn you fuckers!”
— Alan
— Alan
Actually, the hackers are in violation of good old 18 USC 1030(3)©: Whoever intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains information from any protected computer if the conduct involved an interstate or foreign communication; shall be punished (list of punishments). So. . .oops. Was being l33t in a MMORG worth being owned by the guy with the most cigarettes?
DAoC worked out of the Box Jason.
Actually, the quote is “The client is in the hands of the enemy.” This was coined in 1989 by Dr. Kelton Flinn, one of the founders of Kesmai Corp. and the primary coder on Air Warrior and MultiPlayer BattleTech, among other games.
I guess the old tritism is true: a picture is worth a thousand words. After four years of hype whooshed by me, that single picture of the intrepid explorers fighting dragons ten thousand meters below the deepest ocean’s surface has made me want to buy Shadowbane. “WHO’S DOING THIS”
Prisoner rape is a horrible and tragic blight on our society. There’s nothing funny about it. It’s probably the worst and most ignored human rights violation in this country.
I suggest you check out www.spr.org and read some of the statistics and make a donation to help fight prisoner rape.
[quote=“Jessica”]
Actually, the quote is “The client is in the hands of the enemy.” This was coined in 1989 by Dr. Kelton Flinn, one of the founders of Kesmai Corp. and the primary coder on Air Warrior and MultiPlayer BattleTech, among other games.[/quote]
Interesting. I wasn’t actually (as far as I knew at the time) quoting or misquoting anyone. I was just making a statement that I thought looked good in quotes. :)
People seem to forget that EverQuest, apart from the servers being overloaded for the first few days, worked better at launch than any MMORPG released since. DAOC worked from the box as well, although a huge portion of the game was unavailable at launch.