Massively^™

Meridian 59 is a game with a pirate problem. A while back, the server source code leaked onto the internet and seedy players began hosting their own servers without subscription fees. Pirate servers are a problem for many MMOs, but because of M59's comparatively small scale, it has a lot more to lose to the trend.

Amidst these troubles, some M59 players can be quite loyal. Case in point: the blog of game developer Patrick Rogers tells the story of two former M59 players hacking into a pirate server and mass-killing all its residents with powerful admin commands. The vigilantes hoped to make life (and death) on the pirate servers as unpleasant as possible so as to encourage the residents to migrate to the legitimate servers hosted by Near Death Studios. That's not the most amazing bit, though.

Pretty much everyone knows that "exploit" is a dirty word. An exploit in an MMOG is anything that lets you work outside of the established rules of the game to do something that you couldn't normally do, usually in a way that lets you bypass or defeat content more easily than you're supposed to be able to. Finding a way to jump the fence before Arathi Basin actually starts is an exploit. Purposely glitching trash mobs into walls so that you can walk past them to a raid boss is an exploit. Killing a monster from a position where they're totally unable to hurt you is an exploit. In PvP gameplay, exploits are the kiss of death -- they break the game and make things totally unfun, because one player is cheating at the game.

But is that necessarily the case for PvE gameplay? I'm not so sure. The commonest way to avoid players using exploits to kill monsters is that when a monster decides that a player is jerking it around too much (and is able to damage it without being hurt themselves), the monster just starts evading and goes back to its starting point. It's the virtual NPC equivalent of saying, "Fine, you don't want to play fair? I'm going home." But that mechanic misses an important consideration -- it's kind of fun to find and use ways to exploit mobs.

Have you ever wanted to walk through walls in MMO? How about telepathically sense the locations of all the good drops in a zone, or make invisible things very, very visible?

A blog post by game designer Raph Koster (of Ultima Online and now Metaplace fame) will tell you how! Admittedly, Koster doesn't really go into much detail. Also, he's trying to help developers avoid hacking problems, not giving inside secret tips to hackers. It's still an interesting read, though!

He lays out an overview of the various design choices developers make that are exploited by hackers. For example, some developers might choose to trust the client to handle collision detection to reduce lag and increase gameplay responsiveness. Well, a clever hacker can make the client report to the server with false collision information, allowing that hacker to move through walls. It turns out that most designers take a middle-of-the-road approach, meaning that, as Koster puts it: "only bad-ass hackers are cheating, instead of damn near everyone."

Blizzard recently announced the folks behind the creation and sale of the popular Glider program, MDY Industries, are the latest target in an ongoing campaign against bots, hackers, and gold farmers. Blizzard claims that Glider, a third party software program that turns your character into a bot, has caused them in excess of US$20 Million in revenue. In their motion against MDY they claim:

• Since Glider levels players faster, Blizzard lost revenue from shortened subscriptions
• Glider violates their EULA and TOU through bot-ting
• Glider can be used for gold farming, damaging the in game experience of others
• Blizzard must spend money and time tracking down Glider users

MDY claims innocence, of course, stating that nowhere in the EULA or TOU (at the time the motions was filed) was a violation dictated that covered the use of the Glider program. Glider does not modify any of the game files nor does it mine or hack data from any of the game servers and thus, they argue, is not a violation of any of the rules governing the use of WoW. MDY believes that Glider 'has actually increased WoW's subscription revenue' since players hit the critical level 70 faster, with less frustration, and often find themselves craving more and opening a second account.

As the creator of Glider, Michael Donnelly, makes clear, it all started as a noble desire to catch up to his friends and enjoy content together. The case has caused Blizzard some bad press over the method used to inform Mr. Donnelly of their desire to sue his company. An unidentified private investigator, a lawyer, and a nice little note at the door asking him to stop selling the product they believe hits them in the wallet. Has Blizzard gone too far? What defines cheating? Who is truly at a loss? All questions we have to find answers to amidst the approaching storm.

[Updated to fix links]

You can't deny it; there's something exciting about seeing something you aren't supposed to see. It may have happened to you before, perhaps accidentally. You were minding your own business, just jumping down a flight of stairs in the Sunken Temple instance. And then ... BAM! Suddenly you're staring into a sea of light blue. "Am I dead?" you ask yourself. "What happened?" You rotate your camera angle and notice you can see three floors below you. You rotate it a little more and suddenly the grand design of the mighty level developer is revealed to you. You can see the entire dungeon stretching into the distance of ethereal blue. You've accidentally crossed over to the other side. You've entered the matrix!

OK, so maybe it's not always quite that dramatic, but it's definitely interesting when you accidentally or accidentally-on-purpose stumble upon these little tears in the fabric of MMOspace. Many of us enjoy the exploration components of MMOGs. We love to find the hidden nooks and crannies of the world, the small places not often visited by our fellow gamers because they're in remote locations. Sometimes in our desire to see absolutely everything in the game, we stumble across these glitches that let us see a bit more than we're supposed to see. I think it's only natural to want to pull back the veil on our unrealities and see the "Wizard behind the curtain", so to speak. But of course anytime you begin participating in things that go slightly beyond the boundary of what you're "supposed" to be doing in a game, it starts to bring up questions about exploits and cheating. Viewing the underbelly of an MMOG hardly seems like a crime, but at what point exactly do you cross the threshold that will get you into trouble? At what point are we talking about account bans?

GameSpy has an interview up with the Final Fantasy XI team about their recent heavy crackdown on real money trading in their game. The team talks about the two methods that they use to track down and deal with RMT. Although the translation is a little rough, from what we could gather the team takes into account the number of targeted accounts involved in RMT as well as the game economy reaction to their activity. Aside from that, the FFXI team looks at the forum responses from the North American, European and Japanese as well as reports of in-game mail advertising real money trades. The team say that with these methods they are seeing a real decline in RMT sales and dishonest conduct within their game.

Additionally, the team says these are only the early steps towards a complete removal of RMT from FFXI, which would be a fairly huge accomplishment for any massively game. If the monthly bans were to stop, the shady activities would definitely restart, so we're not entirely sure if the team will ever truly be done getting rid of RMT activities.

[Via Ten Ton Hammer]

Let's face it - if you've played any MMO for any significant amount of time, chances are you've made use of one mod or another during the course of your experience. Whether you picked it up to help you heal your raid, maximize your DPS, or to optimize your crafting efficiency, mods have always fallen into a sort of gray area as far as the terms of service are concerned, and have the subject of heated moral debate amongst players. After all, is it really fair to modify a game in such a way that gives you a decided advantage over the competition? We've always assumed this was the stance taken by most developers -- if it's not part of the game code, it's not sanctioned by the developers. That is, until we caught this bit on the blue tracker last week.

Drysc, a "blue" mod over on the World of Warcraft forums, came out in support of mods -- citing how they help demonstrate features that the player base feels are lacking in the retail code. He said that many of the features that WoW employs today were inspired in whole or in part by fan-created mods. He even punctuated one post on the subject with, "I <3 mods." Now, we know that Blizzard has at least acknowledged the usefulness of mods in the past, but they've taken some more contrary measures, like patching games in such a way as to fundamentally break certain mods. To hear a dev step outside of this tenuous acquiescence and throw full-on support for mods still threw us for a loop.

Raph Koster was nice enough to come by and read our post about Live Gamer and their attempts to make RMT legit, and responds that while I suggested RMT was cheating and reading strategy guides was not, many older gamers actually do consider sites like Thottbot and EVE-db cheating. Just as the spirit of gaming evolved to consider outside help legitimate, so, Raph argues, will designers give up to market and player pressure, and make RMT viable and "legal."

Which is probably true-- it's easy to see a future where a game like Dungeon Runners becomes a big hit, and 90% of the people play the game for free (or close to it), and the other 10% of the audience pays for the game by using only the highest level items and gear, and shelling out money for both. But personally, I'd rather go for Raph's other idea-- that smart designers will find ways around integrating RMT solutions by coming up with ways to make RMT unnecessary. I've written and talked about this before-- when it's impossible and/or inconvenient to obtain ingame items with real money, players just won't do it. And no players means no market.

And let's not forget, either, that these are just games we're talking about-- RMT can buy you all the items you want, but it can't buy you great gameplay, and that's the reason we're all here in the first place. If designers emphasize gameplay over simple epic item collection in the first place, there's no reason for RMT at all. Companies like Live Gamer smell money in the air around virtual items, but hopefully (and this is what Raph doubted in his first post) there is still more money to be made with a successful widespread game than just selling the items inside of it.