Hypergrid Business is reporting that an unknown person or persons destroyed a large number of OpenSim regions over the weekend, by exploiting a weakness in LxLabs' Linux-based HyperVM management software. OpenSim is a popular third-party reverse-engineered implementation of Linden Lab's Second Life server software used in a variety of commercial, non-commercial and educational virtual-environment grids.

More than 100 regions are reported lost, along with any data that wasn't backed up off-site. Apparently more than just the simulators were taken down, Web-pages and other ancillary data and files on the affected servers were also lost in the attack.

OpenSim regions using virtualization software other than LxLabs' HyperVM were unaffected. The attack hit more than just third-party Second Life compatible grids, however, as more than 100,000 other websites and servers were wiped over the weekend using the software exploit.

In the wake of the attacks and massive data-loss, LxLabs' founder, K T Ligesh (32) allegedly committed suicide in his Bangalore home on Monday.

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Cartoon Network has done fairly well for itself with its IP-centric FusionFall. In fact, the words 'wildly successful' may come to mind when you take into account that FusionFall has already gained over 4 million registered users since its January launch. Having a TV network to promote the game is advantageous, of course, but with that many kids running around in the game's world, it was inevitable that some of them would get up to mischief.

This topic came up in an interview conducted by MMORPG.com's Carolyn Koh with FusionFall community director Richard Weil. It's interesting to note that some kids are basically testing the limits of the game world by finding ways into the "Wastelands" -- vast in-game areas where the developers test aspects of FusionFall. These players have managed to find holes in the game code and slip into these off-limits areas that were thought hidden and inaccessible to them in the first place.

Mission architect -- an amazing system that allows a very creative player-base to finally take the reigns of creation and make amazing in-game arcs that feature personalized stories, personalized characters, farming, well made.... wait, what?

Yes, you heard that right, people have already began to leverage City of Heroes's architect system into nothing more than powerleveling tool, and the community doesn't find that to be too enjoyable. Luckily, Matt "Positron" Miller, the lead designer, has already stepped up with a post to the community on the City of Heroes message board about how they plan on dealing with these problems.

The team wishes to remove the rewards some characters may have gained through powerleveling, all the way up to removing access to characters that were solely leveled up via mission architect exploits. Past working on a player by player bases, some badges will be changed while others may be removed entirely due to the exploiting groups surrounding them. Lastly, but certainly not least, the team will be proactively banning missions that are created to exploit the system.

For Matt's full plan, check out his post over on the City of Heroes message board.

As epic scandals go, WoW has had its fair share and the latest -- centred around a rather boring looking shirt called Martin Fury -- has had everyone talking over at our sister site WoW Insider.

So it goes like this. One of the guild members of The Marvel Family on US-Vek'nilash, a fellow named Leroyspeltz, discovered a mysterious GM-only item has been sent to one of his alts when Blizzard were restoring items after his account had been hacked. So he gives this unassuming shirt to his Guild Leader, Karatechop, who decided to take it for a spin -- in Ulduar. He didn't file a ticket but rather assumed it was okay for them to have it because it came from Blizzard. They used it fourteen times in various instances as well as Malgyos and 25-man Obsidian Sanctum.

Aventurine smash! Well, they smash people who attempt to impersonate GMs and cheat in their game, at least.

Over at Hardcore Casual, Syncaine has put up a post discussing Aventurine's hardline attitude to players in their game, Darkfall. The company has already said, straight out, that they will ban players for an offense like attempting to impersonate a GM or cheating in their game. No warnings, no temporary boots, we're talking a full ban on the first offense.

What is unclear, from the perspective of a player, is how well Aventurine is implementing their own policies. From one player's perspective, it seems that the GMs are certainly on the ball and are dealing with people who attempt to use joke names. But as to how many people may have been banned by Aventurine's staff? Well, that's an unknown number that most likely will never be released outside of the company.

Even so, a hardline stance like the one Aventurine is taking isn't seen very often in MMOs. Companies worry about alienating their player base with moves such as those.

Interested in the full post? Check it out over at Hardcore Casual.

Tasos, Darkfall's community guy, posted an update on the official boards on Saturday addressing a litany of concerns that have been plaguing the user base since the game's launch.

While he did include patch notes in the update, the majority of his message dealt with issues beyond the game's live design. Tasos claims server queuing has been resolved, as have lag and random crash issues that have been popping up since release.

He also says Aventurine, Darkfall's developer, will credit players with 34 days of free play time to compensate for the problems they've been experiencing.

Since Aventurine only made the game available to a limited number of subscribers, North American fans of the game haven't yet been able to actually buy the game. The company is hoping to make the game available for sale again "sometime this coming week; again it will have to be a limited amount of copies to allow a smooth integration of new players into the game." But no news on which regions will have access to Darkfall yet.

In addition to availability issues, Tasos specifically mentioned unattended macroing as a problem Aventurine wants to address. The practice of using third-party programs to improve a character while the player doesn't monitor the character's progress is as old as MMOGs; it was particularly popular in another skill-based game, Ultima Online.

The company as yet doesn't have a hard-coded solution to deal with macroers, but Tasos included this note in the update: "we will appeal to players not actually playing the game to log off rather than leaving their character in-game. This will allow more people to be able to enjoy Darkfall instead of unmanned characters taking up server space. If you're skilling up by not playing the game as it was intended, you will be kicked and repeated offenses will result in a ban."

There are no levels in Darkfall Online. Instead, they use a skill-based progression system. For example: the more you cast magic missile, the better your magic missiles become. Once your magic missile becomes good enough, you will be able to learn a more powerful spell. Obviously a system like this can be easily exploited by macro or bot programs, so it isn't surprising that Adventurine is taking a strict stance against any such exploitation. Of course, there are also the reports of speedhacking where players can run as fast or faster than sprint without losing stamina.

Tasos does not define the term "macro" in the policy, so one must assume its definition is broad. A macro could be assigning several actions to a single hotkey (e.g., a combination of attacks in a particular sequence). A macro could also be a reactionary action (e.g., whenever you are cursed, auto-cast your "remove curse" spell). Anyone caught macroing or spamming spells in the safety of a city or tower area will be warned once, kicked, and potentially banned for repeat attempts. It doesn't seem like they'll punish macro-users in the riskier open-world unless the macros are unattended (generally called bots). Finally, anyone caught using third-party cheating, hacking, modding, or botting programs will be perma-banned no matter where they are.

[Via MMORPG.com]

The starbase exploit has been some big news lately. How does it impact your ability to assess the state of EVE's economy, and are there assumptions you've made in the past that you need to reassess now?

It's a good thing that you mentioned the starbase exploit because we are in the final stages of creating a very thorough dev blog on that, which will hopefully be published very soon. [Note: this interview was conducted just prior to the release of the investigation's findings.]

There are certain things with the POS exploit that made it very difficult to detect. You basically needed to be able to go to that particular starbase and look at it, look at the setup and so on. It was difficult for us to detect it otherwise, except from the code once we knew what we were looking for.

From a market perspective the EVE economy has become so big that in order for you to impact the market you will really have to have large quantities. And as will be shown in this dev blog that will be published, the scale of the exploit really didn't start until late 2008... to the large industrial scale so that it started to impact the market.

The EVE Online starbase exploit revealed in December has had a far-reaching impact on the game. Certain player-owned starbases in EVE were producing valuable, high-end materials that they shouldn't have been. Once a group of players picked up on this, they exploited the game on a massive scale, resulting in trillions of ISK (Interstellar Kredits, the game's virtual currency) that never should have existed being injected into the game. To date, this is the largest economic manipulation (via an exploit) ever revealed in EVE Online.

The starbase exploit was the first of several player-triggered drama bombs that hit the game in recent weeks, and resulted in a substantial amount of (in-game) market turmoil and player outcry over the issue. The game's subscribers wanted openness on the matter from EVE's developer, CCP Games, and they've certainly got that as of today. CCP Games posted the results of the exploit investigation, and the caveat "be careful what you wish for" may apply here, given the depth and complexity of the findings conveyed to the playerbase in today's dev blog, "War Makes Thieves and Peace Hangs Them."

It's no secret that I keep my eye on the Final Fantasy XI community. With two friends running an upstanding linkshell on the Bahamut server, I like to know what goes on in the game.

The current word on the street is the "big banhammer freakout." The vocal players are talking about what linkshells were hit by losing players caught up in the cheating scandal. But what's interesting are the words being thrown around -- things like "unprecedented" and "uncalled for."

A quick jaunt across the street to the loving and cuddly galaxy of New Eden shows that something suspiciously similar happened to corporation starbases in EVE Online, also ending with tears, banned accounts, and the exact same arguments being thrown around the community. "I didn't know it was an exploit," "It's not my fault," "They made me do it," and my personal favorite, "You should have fixed it."

So this week's Anti-Aliased isn't dedicated to some developer mishap or some bad piece of game design, it's dedicated to how daft some people are when it comes to cheating.

It's all the company's fault

Yes, it's all their fault that they didn't notice that they misplaced that one period in thousands upon thousands of lines of code. It's their fault that they don't run Salvage 40,000 times a week and check every rock and pebble in Vana'diel.

People who make this rationale probably never looked at the innards of a program -- especially an MMO. You have lines of programming being done by multiple authors and you have logs that extend miles long. Even with specialized programs, it takes time to sift through all of that information.

Case in point: Square-Enix fixed this glitch in November and banned people in late January. The delay wasn't because they were playing ping-pong in the basement and drinking beer. It was the double-edged decision of first finding who stood to gain on all of their servers, and then deciding an appropriate punishment. That takes time.

You know, this probably would have been caught sooner if more people would have stood up and reported it, instead of, you know, trying to conceal it. Then, when they get caught concealing it, they blame the company for not knowing about it. That's just poor form.

The game owes me

The game owes you what? It owes you for all the time you spent playing it, enjoying the challenges with your friends and engaging in an ever-changing world?

Certainly I'm horribly opinionated, but I like to play games for fun. Whenever a game ceases to be fun to me, I stop playing and stop paying. I play because I enjoy it, and I hope other people are out there doing the same.

FFXI may be an exercise in sadistic game design, but every player has the chance to walk away from Vana'diel. I did because I didn't have the time and I ended up enjoying the lore of World of Warcraft. If you are at the point that you hate the game so much that you believe it owes you something for your time spent playing it, then perhaps it's time to take a step back from it. There are plenty of other options in the game world.

But Square-Enix isn't without fault

The voices of the banned are right about one thing though -- Square-Enix has been inconsistent. Some people are getting banned for being in one of these cheating Salvage runs, and others are getting slaps on the wrists. There doesn't seem to be any clear consistency to how they slapped down the punishments.

The first part of a reliable punishment is to make sure it's handed out consistently and with appropriate measure. Without that, people second guess if the punishment is truly necessary. It's like if a professor gave you a D on a test just because he didn't like your hand writing. Your answers never mattered, and that's what makes you angry -- it didn't feel justifyable.

What it all comes down to

Even with Square-Enix messing up like that, it doesn't change the facts. Players knew about the exploit, players attempted to hide the exploit, Square-Enix found the exploit, and players got what they should have known was coming. All of these people had the chance to stand up, call a GM, and say what was going on.

If they had and this problem would have been caught earlier, bans probably wouldn't have been mentioned. These people would still have had their accounts. Certainly they would have less gear on those accounts, but it's really hard to use virtual weaponry when you can't log in.

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Colin Brennan is the weekly writer of Anti-Aliased who can still log into Final Fantasy XI when he wants to. When he's not writing here for Massively, he's over running Epic Loot For All! with his insane friends. If you want to message him, send him an e-mail at colin.brennan AT weblogsinc DOT com, or follow him on Twitter.

The Square-Enix bahnammer recently came down onto the Final Fantasy XI community, permanently banning 550 non-RMT accounts that were involved in performing an exploit that has occurred over a two year time period -- an exploit that some say SE was aware of, but never took steps to correct.

The exploit in question was only available to linkshells involved several endgame activities. The basic premise was finish the activity and then before the item drops from a treasure chest or monster the alliance of parties would break into their separate groups. For you Warcraft players, a raid would cease to be a raid and break down to the parties involved. Then each of the 3 parties in the alliance would get a copy of whatever items would drop. So, instead of 1 set of loot, you would grab 3 sets of loot -- including some items that could be sold for millions on the auction house.

In stark contrast to the extremely in-game-oriented Grab Bag No. 8, Grab Bag No. 9, the "CS Special", focuses on interactions with the game's CSRs. The Customer Service team put together a list of some of the questions they see on the job and then answered them in detail, so that maybe, just maybe, a handful of players will find out what they needed to know and not have to bother them.

Some of the answers are quite interesting. For example, did you know that you can't check whether a player you appealed for exploiting ended up getting banned, due to privacy policies? If you really hate them, perhaps you should send along some extra complaints to make sure your dirty work is carried out -- okay, that sort of goes against the spirit of the Grab Bag to make less work for the CSRs, so let's not do that. Only if you really really hate them.

In all seriousness, the Grab Bag does give some good insight into exactly what the CS team can do for you, and how to approach certain issues. Make sure to check it out before you file your next appeal.

2008 was quite a year for the sci-fi massively multiplayer online game, EVE Online. It was chock full of surprises -- both good and bad -- and of course the requisite drama you get when putting as many as 45,000 players in one galactic setting.

So much has happened that columnist Michael Lastucka has written a recap of 2008 in New Eden for Massive Gamer Magazine. Longtime EVE Online players also know him as Winterblink, someone who's been playing the game since its beta days, and he shares a bit of his perspective on the major happenings in EVE over the last year -- and what a year it was:

Would you fall for this? (Please say 'no'...): A complete stranger approaches you on the sidewalk outside of your bank and shows you a rare coin he says is worth twenty thousand dollars. "I want to just give this coin to you," he says, "but I don't want anyone to know we did this... tax issues, you see." The stranger suggests putting it in your safe deposit box, but because he's so concerned about privacy, he wants access to your safe deposit box to be sure the rare coin gets there, with no one the wiser. The problem is that he can only get in there with your express permission...

We're guessing 99.99% of you would never get suckered by something asinine like this, but why then do people fall for the exact same thing in the virtual realm? Specifically, it seems that Guild Wars players regularly turn over their login info to account thieves in hopes of getting something for nothing, as mentioned by Ravious over at Kill Ten Rats. This ultimately leads to a continuous deluge of stolen accounts, tears, and rage.