NCsoft Confirms "Character Hack" Via Packet Manipulation.


The saga of NCsoft account security continues with the confirmation that an existent exploit in NCsoft’s systems. Not too long ago, I reported on Scayth, an Aion player whose account was compromised while it was inactive. The account was looted, and one or more of the characters may have been used for gold farming purposes.

Thanks to Scayth’s ongoing updates over at Aionsource, he was able to procure a reply (finally) from NCsoft over the account issues. The full image is below, but I will summarize:

  1. The majority of accounts compromised have been through social engineering, viruses, fansites, and keyloggers.
  2. The account was never hacked, the individual characters were. The account itself was not in any danger.
  3. The hacker was able to use packet manipulation to access different characters at whim. The process is “very complicated” and did not give them full access.
  4. Few characters can be accessed in this fashion, Scayth just happened to be one of the unlucky few, among 10 others who were also restored.
  5. The process tricked the system into believing that the character belonged to that account.
  6. The servers were hotfixed to prevent this that same day.
This will explain it all.

What will come next in the NCsoft security saga? MMO Fallout will certainly be here to cover the events.

New WoW Armory Sparks Privacy Outrage


Because you didn't look enough like a nerd before.

Ask someone who strays away from MMOs what their biggest fear about the genre is, and chances are one of those answers will be along the lines of “looking like a nerd.” Despite World of Warcraft, among other games, bringing MMOs into the mainstream audience, many MMOers (alongside video games as a whole) still fear the age old stereotype that we are all basement dwelling nerds with pale skin who live with our parents at the age of 30, dress up as female characters, and participate in LARPing. Now, I may not have a basement, and my Irish/Croatian/German mixture does leave me with mayonnaise-esque skin, and I am under all consideration a nerd, however I am at least ten years off of 30, and still in college.

But I’m getting off track here. Blizzard’s recent update (as with all updates) is causing quite an outrage among privacy advocates. The update to the Armory now broadcasts all of the player’s feats in real time, with the option to subscribe via RSS. Players are also unable to opt out of this feed, or keep it protected to friends and family, making it the bane of players who either shouldn’t be playing World of Warcraft, or those who happen to boot the game up at work.

Now, these players may just be wearing their +10 armor tinfoil hat, but there is something to be said about not wanting your activities broadcast for all to see. Chances are, most of you have had marathons that you wouldn’t want broadcast, staying up that extra half hour that turned into a 3am raid, and by the time you got to sleep the sun was coming back up. But I digress.

One of the MMO Fallout Scouters in WoW reported that this is in fact a useful tool to guilds. Using the RSS feed for raids, Guild Leaders could consolidate the members of the raid to a feed, where they could monitor what the players are looting to ensure that no one is breaking the guild’s rules secretly.

I’m not going to bother going into the legality that people are bringing up, because the move is legal. Blizzard does still have full ownership over everyone’s account, and this is in the terms of service and EULA. Whether or not Blizzard adds an opt-out for this feature comes down to how many players are willing to vote with their wallets and leave over this. Other than that, this all comes down to player’s prerogative.

Age of Conan Downtime/Character Deletion Today


What about the rights of that little girl?

If you are reading this and have not heeded my own, Funcom’s, and other’s warnings to save your inactive, low level characters from deletion, you are too late. As of earlier this morning, Age of Conan’s servers went offline for what will be a twelve hour downtime. Characters that have been inactive for at least seven months prior to today, and are under level 20 (and still in the tutorial) will be deleted as part of an effort to consolidate data, and in preparation for upcoming server mergers.

Naturally there will be players who will complain over this idea, and I did mention in the past article that this would end up being perceived as a grab for money by some, and a threat to others. However, in Funcom’s defense, setting up a separate database with unused characters is not worth the resources it would take to port them back into the game at a future date, especially considering it would likely cost the user money, at a price not worth spending on a character that has yet to make way out of the tutorial. I also noted that a lot of the criticism was coming from players who had no intention of playing either way, a group I have noted several times in the past whose feedback should be ignored at all opportunities.

More on Age of Conan, such as the upcoming server mergers, as it appears.

New Categories: Rumor Mill, Hot Topics


Although I regularly bring up my disdain for writing about rumors here on MMO Fallout, I regularly report on MMOs that fall within the levels of not completely confirmed, but at the same time not confirmed to be false either. Although I intended the Upcoming category to be used for MMOs that are in development, eventually it got to the point where there are so many titles flying in and out of each state: Rumor, confirmed, not confirmed, confirmed, still a rumor, not going to happen, and back again.

So I created a new category to deal with those MMOs that aren’t quite confirmed, the Rumor Mill. Rumor Mill games fit under one of the following categories:

  • Confirmed, but unnamed: Blizzard’s MMO is an example of this. We know Blizzard is working on an MMO, but we have no name and no other information. When Blizzard names this title, it will find its place in the Upcoming category.
  • Unconfirmed: MMO ideas rise and fall like flies, every 24 hours. The prospect of a Harry Potter MMO was born and died practically overnight, not to mention a Halo MMO, and other ideas. This is the main meat of the Rumor Mill, titles that have been hinted at but not officially confirmed.
  • Uncertain Of Release: If an MMO’s release is in question, I will also place it in the Rumor Mill. Naturally, the Fallout MMO and Stargate Worlds qualified for this category. This is one of the rarer cases, and if a title is confirmed to not be coming out, the category will simply be deleted, rather than moved over to defunct.

I have received a few emails, both joking and serious, calling the way I treat categories “elitist,” but in all honesty it is simply to keep the website organized. There are slightly over 40 games with their own category, and as cluttered as the “live” section is, will be growing over time, and yet I still don’t hold a candle to mmorpg.com, that follows every MMO and currently has over 400 titles listed.

So in order to remove the strain from the “live” section, I set up a new category to move the more popular titles over to. Hot Titles is where you’ll find the most discussed games on MMO Fallout. Not necessarily the most popular player-wise, but that have the most news coverage. For example, Age of Conan is actually the hottest topic on MMO Fallout, although “Age of Conan nude” comes under less than 1% of those search terms.

Jagex: Making Threats? Get The Police…


Update: For reasons I was unable to uncover, this article was originally published as a blank slate. Although I lost what I had written, I was able to recover the original draft and reupload it. Remember to always keep a backup of your work!

You're going to need an attorney...

“Gonna kill myself.”
-Any MMOer

How many times have you typed that out in chat? In jest, of course, not in a serious manner. Something goes wrong, you get killed, you lose something, you accidentally destroyed your favorite and most powerful weapon, or someone backstabbed you and the only conveyance of your disappointment in yourself or the game is to make an off-color joke about suicide.

Unfortunately for players, and unlike Walt Disney, Jagex doesn’t find suicide very funny, in any context. Following a somewhat high profile suicide that was posted on the Runescape forums several years ago, Jagex has since been taking threats of suicide very seriously, no matter what context it may be in. Players reportedly threatening suicide in order to have their accounts banned started receiving this message instead:

But a talking to may not be the only thing you receive. MMO Fallout has received several reports and accounts of players being reported for threatening suicide, only to have the police show up to investigate a reported threatened suicide. It appears Jagex has joined a small group of developers who are taking no chances and forwarding all threats to the proper authorities.

I know this is going to get some comments about free speech and taking jokes too seriously, but the difference between “I’m gonna kill myself” and “I’m gonna kill myself” is nonexistent when in the form of text, unless the sarcasm is very explicitly pointed out. This is one issue online that many people continue to forget, and are surprised when what they say is taken verbatim.

I am not going to try to force my sense of humor down your throat (because it is far less appropriate than jokes about suicide), just keep in mind who may be listening in. You don’t joke about bombs in an airport, and you don’t joke about guns in a school, so don’t be surprised when your joke (by perception) is taken with less humor than you would like it to be.

G-Unit Reports: No Critical Security Issues


G-Unit doesn't handles account theft.

Our game servers, account databases, and support sites are under constant attack and being probed for any vulnerability. It’s a war that by no means is over.
-Scott Jennings, NCsoft on Aion.

There may not be a fight between gold farmers and developers as intense what is going on between Aion and the gold farmers. Not simply definable as a growing feud, this battle has turned into all-out gang war, with NCsoft going as far as bringing in G-Unit (no, not that G-Unit) to fight off the hoard of bots and spammers. The gold farmers have also stepped up their part of the fight by doing their best to steal as many player accounts as possible, not to mention launching countless attacks against NCsoft’s security systems.

Scott Jennings, in a recent note to the community, affirms players that they are continuing the monitor systems, and have confirmed that there are currently no critical issues with the NCsoft account security. NCsoft will continue to audit their security systems, and players can expect changes to come this year, continuing the security updates Guild Wars and other NCsoft titles received last year.

Following the high profile, and very sobering (as described by Jennings) cyber attack that breached the systems of Google and a host of other companies, it is difficult for players to feel that their information is safe. Unfortunately all we can do is watch and try our best to keep our information safe, while at the same time hoping nothing happens over on the developer’s end.

More on Aion, Security, NCsoft, and more as it appears.

Everquest II: Leveling To Be Made Easier


New Expansion, New Level Cap

The typical MMO Expansion rules include new zones, occasionally a new class or two, perhaps a new race, and increasing the level cap. Of course, this eventually presents the problem that once you raise the level cap several times, it becomes a very long process for newer players to jump into the game and knock their way up to end-game, compared to those who had been in the game long enough to level with it.

So naturally, every now and then you have to increase the speed that players level. World of Warcraft did this by increasing the experience gained by quests in some levels and reducing the experience needed in other levels. Everquest 2 started with a level 50 cap, and now features a level cap of 80.

In response, Sony is releasing a patch to make the leveling smoother. Levels 1 to 65 have not been made shorter, but the experience has been mixed around to make the process much smoother. Levels 65 to 75 require less experience, and quests in this range will give more experience to adventurers. This is a good move, especially considering that several times during Everquest 2, there were levels that required more experience than further levels, an issue that will be fixed with this patch.

More on Everquest 2 and its leveling process as it appears. Sentinel’s Fate hits next month.

Bethesda/Zenimax: What Is Going On Over There?


It is likely not Fallout

Zenimax Media is just one of the Area 51’s of the MMO world. Zenimax owns Bethesda, id Software, and several other studios. The studio has since become the MMO branch of Bethesda, and according to past rumors has been working on an upcoming title since at least 2007. Rumors had it that the MMO was going to be the oft-rumored Fallout MMO that Interplay had started but never gave information on.

In court documents recently discovered during the Bethesda Interplay lawsuit, details have come forward related to this secret MMO that Zenimax has been working on. Bethesda has funneled tens of millions of dollars into this project, that has been under development since 2006 (So the rumors were not far off). A team of approximately one hundred people are working on the game, and according to VG247, should have been announced last year.

In the legal documents, Bethesda has described the title as a “World of Warcraft” style MMO, and may be set 200 years after Oblivion (as revealed by the Elder Scrolls novel, that accidentally leaked the next game in the series). It is not currently clear what Bethesda means by a WoW-like MMO, in the creative sense or the mechanic sense (It’s an MMO).

So what does VG247’s source say about this MMO? It is based on the Elder Scrolls series. Even better, the title was supposed to be announced late 2009, but the announcement was somehow missed, potentially relating to the lawsuit between Bethesda and Interplay. VG247 appears to be very confident in their source.

There does seem to be some legitimacy in the claims, as Bethesda has reportedly moved to have any revealing legal documents censored to the public domain, even though the old analogy fits of closing the fence door once the horses have escaped. It is possible but unlikely that Zenimax is working on a Fallout MMO in expectation that Interplay will lose the lawsuit, and for all intense and purpose, they do know a lot more than we do as to how well the court case is going.

More on Bethesda’s MMO as it becomes apparent, and more on Fallout (The MMO) as it appears as well.

Jagex Dips Into Microtransactions…


Play War of Legends, free forever my lord!

Perhaps I shouldn’t have made the connection between Jagex and Evony several months ago, because I don’t think I’ll be able to play Jagex’s latest title to go into open beta, War of Legends, without thinking of microtransactions, gold farming companies, and breasts. War of Legends plays out much like Evony, and similar titles. Players start a city, they become more powerful, and they branch out into other areas of the world. Eventually player vs player combat is allowed and players can ransack each other’s cities, and build new cities, and trade, and pay for everything out the tooth with microtransactions.

War of Legends also happens to be Jagex’s first take on microtransactions in the form of Jcredits (The J presumably standing for Jagex), a move the company displayed interest in several years ago, but noted that doing so in Runescape would not be beneficial to the game’s economy. War of Legends does, of course, set up the possibility for future titles (IE: Stellar Dawn) to incorporate some form of payment system similar to this, however no word from Jagex has arrived.

And before the inevitable comparisons start, yes War of Legends looks suspiciously like Evony, minus being developed by a gold farming company, and advertising with breasts. Micro-payments are nothing new, and Jagex is just one of the many companies to dive into it this year, including Blizzard who many thought would never “sink so low” (their words, not mine.)

On second thought...