Goblin Squad Member
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Serious exploit in Darkfall, 4-day rollback
I hope the devs are ready for this sort of tenacity. :(
We need to be vigilant an open with the developers with exploits like this.
We joke about the heart and soul of the community but issues like this could potentially destroy the faith in the game.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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The biggest problem in these situations is that they have often been ongoing much longer than anyone really understands. Typically they exist quietly for a very long time as a small number of players exploit them carefully, taking advantage but not doing so much that the exploit distorts the way the game is played. They have a goose, it lays golden eggs.
Then eventually enough people learn about the exploit, and there are always people who are too greedy or too stupid to understand what they're doing is going to kill the goose. Suddenly over a very short period of time the exploit goes public and gets massively abused.
That's when the rollbacks happen - to get back to the point before the thing goes viral.
The best exploits in MMOs are rarely detected. The people who know about them guard them like precious jewels. And the people who do the exploiting, until the thing goes viral, are very rarely caught. And its impossible to unwind it.
You just have to keep an eye out for the early signs of viral behavior and be ready to pounce on it as fast as you can. These things tend to happen on Fridays (players aren't clueless) and major decisions like rollbacks usually can't be made until the following Monday. It happens to almost every MMO and it would be bizarre if it didn't happen to us.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Just look at Diablo 3. People thought that that was secure for a long time. Then it turns out that people had been able to dupe gems from the very start. The method got out, it got onto Reddit, and within the hour it was basically shut down.
But that didn't stop a few small people making an incredibly large amount of money by selling them on the RMAH.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Not completely. Obviously I am not a developer, so I may be misinformed, but my understanding is that its removal is generally seen as a thematic one. They didn't think they were being helped by having everyone see every item in real money value. It demoralised a vast majority of the players. It's difficult to explain why you just grinded for 100 hours to get a rare drop when you can go to work for an hour and just buy it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There should be a reward system in place. Give exploiters incentive to turn things in. Something persistent, yet not game-breaking, that compares in value to exploiting the game.
Forgive my ignorance: is that why they killed the Auction House?
There were lots of reasons. They screwed things up, lots of people didn't play because of the AH. With the pre-expansion update they made fundamental changes to the game that were not compatible with an AH system.
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...did they literally trade in cats, like the demons from S6 of Buffy?
Because that's awesome.
Time...is what turns KITTENS...into CATS...
I still use that quote sometimes.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I've never seen an unhackable or unexploitable game. The developers who deem their game such are usually the ones that fall the hardest.
The best you can hope for is that there are people dedicated (read: paid) to monitor and police the game. The chief goblin seems to get it so I'm not too worried, honestly.
By his statements in this thread, I have no worries. He's been around the block a few times. It's always good to bring this sort of thing to light, but none of us should be saying, "I expect none of this type of stuff in PFO." Rather, we should be saying, "Hey, check this out. It could be something to look at preventing in PFO."