Referrer log fun
2007-06-04 18:25 - some-customers-suck security
It’s definitely amusing going over my referrer logs and seeing people searching for “puzzle pirates cheats”, “puzzle pirates hacks”, or “puzzle pirates exploits” visiting my blog. Do you really think that I’d post information how to break into a game I develop on my blog? I certainly think I’d be willing to publish a postmortem of any major problems in the hopes of giving people a better of how Three Rings works on the development side. However, I find it very disappointing how many players want to devalue their own experience and those of other players by seeking out ways to gain an unfair advantage. Puzzle Pirates has only had a few large-scale incidents (Whitefire’s multi-million poe pillage a number of years ago comes to mind), and each time we were able to track down the problem and correct it fairly quickly. We closely monitor the economic state of the game for anomalous activity, receive tips from upstanding players about possible bugs, and have the ability to track all item and currency transactions within the game easily. Other game studios almost certainly have similar degrees of rigor over their respective products. It is not possible to get away with cheating in modern massively multiplayer online games; trying to cheat ruins a good portion of the fun. Don’t even try – chances are that you’ll just lose your account without any gain.
On that note, I’ve been contemplating putting together a number of proposals for a GDC panels regarding customer support systems and anti-cheating mechanisms. But more on that later…
Liz, First off, I enjoy your blog. It’s quite interesting. I’ll be poking at your cgi-wrapper script later. First pass it looks to be secure, but it should be fun to try and take it apart. Secondly, in regards to “Don’t even try – chances are that you’ll just lose your account without any gain.” I agree to a point. I wish that I could poke around at the OOO code without risking my account. There are holes in it to be certain, as all code has holes, it’s just a matter of finding them. Some day, I hope that companies do what you did in your previous post. Place a bounty on finding security exploits. Hat off to ya.
p.s. Just to play fun with you. Look at where I came from. I know you’ve got this IP ;-)
— Rebootkid Oct 1, 02:34 PM #