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dorkasaurus_rex posted:It's pretty fun to hack up perfectly bred Pokemon with all the right stats and moves because that poo poo literally takes hundreds of hours otherwise. And you can only use stuff which is legal anyways so Oh god yes. The sheer tedium of actually getting a pokemon with the right nature and IVs is incredibl. It literally just involves walking and walking and walking and waiting for eggs to hatch. As long as it has legit stats, ability and moveset who cares if it was hacked or not?
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Nov 18, 2014 20:28
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Kild posted:I don't think thats necessarily the case everytime. DFO got shut down (for reportedly low numbers) and had nothing but gold bots/sellers and had a terrible economy because of said bots.
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Nov 18, 2014 20:36
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Coolguye posted:Could you elaborate on how its economy was terrible? I've seen the charge leveled at basically every MMO ever that bots and gold sellers ruin the game's economy but I can never come up with even a workable rationale for that being the case, let alone hard evidence. Inflation was so ridiculously high buying stuff was nearing the gold cap. I played the china version and the same stuff that was selling for billions of gold was selling for 20m. Quest mats and upgrading stuff were low priced of course but any high level gear/avatars/titles were 100 (or higher) times more expensive than any of the non American servers. Playing on the DFO Global Alpha servers people had like 5m when they hit max level after buying almost nothing and vendoring everything since the AH wasn't up. Anyone who was high level and geared either botted themselves or bought gold or got one of the 1/1000000 chance drops after grinding all day to sell to someone who did buy gold. They could hit max level in 10-12 hours. They then would do their whole days worth of fatigue in 20 minutes in which a normal person would take 4-6 hours depending on the dungeons. The bots were so rampant they started immediately back up as soon as the Alpha for DFOGlobal came up to start selling gold immediately and they were so rampant the CEO sent out a letter pleading with them to stop because they didn't want to deal with anticheat on a 4 year old version in a interest check alpha. The global chat was non-stop advertising for gold selling sites even in an Alpha that was going to get wiped in 2 weeks. quote:* This is our plea to you. Please do not hack or abuse the game. It is our responsibility to create enjoyable games, and it is your responsibility to enjoy them. If we focus all of our energy to blocking hacker and abusers, we won’t have enough time to create other exciting new contents or events. We won’t have to time to listen to the majority of players who have been purely enjoying the game. We earnestly ask you not to abuse the game – please enjoy them in the way they were meant to be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVvPXM--pT0 This is just a random persons video and look at the chat. And if they weren't spamming global they were spamming regular chat to get you to join their 'hacking qq' 
Kild fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Nov 18, 2014 |
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Nov 18, 2014 20:58
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What I'll never understand are the morons who cheat in games like Payday 2. I'm not talking about skipping the grind; I'm talking about folks who disable the enemy AI, instapop the vault and all that boring poo poo. It's strictly co-op so you're not gaining an advantage over anyone and you're not ruining anyone's day, so what's the motivation? Why even waste HD space on the game if you don't want to play it?
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Nov 18, 2014 21:06
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Interesting. And that makes sense, too, the reason it got ruined was because there was nothing beyond a few bits of high end gear and the game's currency to actually get valued by the economy, so it went to its more or less idealized spot almost immediately. The funny thing is that instead of putting out a letter begging for mercy, if the CEO had ordered the drop rates changed on the things that were being hocked all the time it would've corrected a LOT of these problems. Botting definitely ruined this economy, but the economy was about as stable as sand to begin with from the look of things. Hobo Siege posted:you're not ruining anyone's day
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Nov 18, 2014 21:10
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The honor and integrity of my purely co-op non-competitive gaaaaaaaaame  Now if you're cheating in Payday 2 where you're triggering slow mo all the time and making GBS threads sentry guns and trip mines out of your rear end or whatever, that's just irritating. But oh nooooo somebody got around the tedious grind I am frothing with rage!!!
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Nov 18, 2014 21:20
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Coolguye posted:Interesting. And that makes sense, too, the reason it got ruined was because there was nothing beyond a few bits of high end gear and the game's currency to actually get valued by the economy, so it went to its more or less idealized spot almost immediately. The funny thing is that instead of putting out a letter begging for mercy, if the CEO had ordered the drop rates changed on the things that were being hocked all the time it would've corrected a LOT of these problems. Well Nexon America didn't update in over a year and didn't quell any of the bots. The Neople company which are the Korean creators of the game decided to fire DFO back up and release it themselves since Nexon America hosed it up so bad. They only had this Alpha up to see how much interest there even was in order to see if it was worth doing since according to Nexon America everyone was bad customers or whatever. So they put up the version that was already 2 years old when we got it 2 years after DFO died. They weren't planning on updating a month interest test and are instead dedicating about 6 months into forking over the current Korean version.
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Nov 18, 2014 21:25
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Chunjee posted:Great idea for a thread. I've seen this video before, from what I remember one of the guys is absolutely insufferable, to the point where probably posts here.
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Nov 18, 2014 21:36
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Mods should sticky this for a week
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Nov 18, 2014 21:37
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Protocol7 posted:I used to aimbot and wallhack in MW2 and Black Ops. People got extremely angry and it was just really entertaining to see people get really mad at a video game they can disconnect from at any time. I dunno, if you're trying to piss people off there's a lot of ways you can do that without paying a dude money for cheats. Here's just a few things i can think of off the top of my head: -Teamkilling -Being a girl/gay - Pretending to be a girl/gay - being good at the game - being bad at the game - idling - existing
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Nov 18, 2014 21:47
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Things are so sophisticated now with dll hooks and poo poo. Back in the day, around 2003, I was one of the first to bot Final Fantasy 11 after it came out in the US (around 2 years behind japan). Serious gold farming was first becoming a "thing" and all we had was autoit, pixel matching, and clever coding. My target was fish, stuff that you could safely farm danger-free in towns and on nearby cliffs. People used to buy moat carp and other fish on the AH for crazy in-game money; they needed the fish to unlock end-game fishing poles and to use them to create potions and stuff. The actual mechanics of the thing were fairly simple; I used a simple autoit script to detect when your lure bobbed (via pixel scraping) and it would hit keys/move the mouse to catch and re-fish. Once my inv was full, I used to get to the AH by breadcrumbing my way across town with a series of /target and /follow to town NPCs. I'd then list/sell the stuff to the AH, make my way back to the fishing spot, rinse, repeat. I'd kick off the script when I slept or went to school, and did it mostly to afford potions and items that my friends and I used while actually playing this abortion of a grindfest game - even today, the words "Vulkrum Dunes" causes me to wince. I didn't see the potential for serious money making at the time. A Korean friend of mine who I showed this to did. He also decided to take it a few steps further than I had. He expanded the scripts I shared with him and made up a few of his own. Before long I started seeing 3 or 4 different characters in-game using the same fishing spots and creating a conga-line from NPC to NPC over to the AH. I asked him and he admitted he had scraped together a bunch of old PCs (virtual machines hadn't been invented at the time) and were running a whole bunch of bots. How many? Oh I don't know, 30, 40 on various shards? His mom's basement was completely crammed with hardware. They were all hooked to some sort of KVM so he could check on his various bots and respond to GM requests. The operators of the game had noticed these guys appearing and acting strange - they weren't sure what to make of it at first, and I guess the GM tools weren't very useful, and they didn't speak english, so the common way they found bots was to teleport them 6 or 7 feet away from the cliff or stream. If it was a real person, they'd just re-position themselves. If they were a bot, they'd continue to fish into the ground and then get banned from the game. Occasionally, they'd whisper cut-pasted english translated questions which amounted to "Are you there? Are you real? Please say something". If you responded, no matter what you said you were good to go. So weeks go by and the botting situation gets larger and larger. He ends up qutting college and I end up ragequitting the game after waking up early on a Saturday and playing until dinnertime, trying to farm a series of level-unlock items to drop with my friends. After seven straight hours of playing and only a single drop there is a brief moment of introspection that causes us to decide that the fun is over. The entire group quits over the following week. I still chat online with my friend and he explains that the market has expanded and now you're able to sell in-game gold for real, actual cash. What a weird concept! People are paying real money for in-game items? Well now there's this burgeoning buyer-seller marketplace overseas, and people like him are farming up money and selling to these places who in turn are then re-selling to individuals who want a little handout. The botting scene has expanded too and people are using these next-gen programs that are designed off of hook-in debuggers to mess around with the actual running code - you aren't limited to screen scraping and keyboard presses, you can now read text directly from the exe in-memory. Cool stuff. We meet up and road trip out to Cedar Point (rollercoasters!) about 6 months after I had quit the game and this is when I realized I had missed the boat - he sheepishly admits that not only did he finance the entire road trip with, but that he had paid off his mother's mortgage for the house where all the bots were, AND bought a new car with the gold farming proceeds. He had been botting for under a year and made out with around 200k in actual cash.
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Nov 18, 2014 22:18
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I cant stop laughing at obviously fake money making stories in this thread. In reality, botting is literally the bitcoins of videogames and you would be lucky to scrape by a minimum wage from botting unless you are one of the 14 people on the Internet who hit a goldmine with a specific economy exploit at just the right time in just the right game. But hey, botting income can only go up, uP, UP! That sad, there is money to be had in exploit writing for competitive games, but that requires coding skills and a significant time investment to pay off. Captain Gordon fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Nov 18, 2014 |
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Nov 18, 2014 22:27
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Capn Beeb posted:The honor and integrity of my purely co-op non-competitive gaaaaaaaaame I think you're way, way more upset about this than the guy who just said that cheating in a co-op game was silly, bro.
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Nov 18, 2014 22:27
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Capn Beeb posted:The honor and integrity of my purely co-op non-competitive gaaaaaaaaame you tryin' to poke the bear bro 'cuz the bear don't care
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Nov 18, 2014 22:28
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How big is cheating/hacking/exploiting in Maple Story these days? I remember I played that stupid loving grindfest years back when there were only two NA servers and they actually had a trading card game attached to it  . I remember Nexon being pretty poo poo about handling cheaters and a lot of times you'd see maps completely barren because someone was vachacking all the monsters into a corner and killing them over and over.
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Nov 18, 2014 22:30
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I've just been scammed out of $500 worth of archeage gold so gently caress it all I'm just gonna try my hand at auction house botting. So in that this thread is a godsend.
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Nov 18, 2014 22:40
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I've helped botting / enhancements in other games as well. Mostly, goon homegrown! I dug through some old files, and found this:quote:// ==UserScript== Yep, a set of old greasemonkey scripts to "enhance" the wonderful soul-crushing browser game that was Astro Empires. Cheating? Technically, I suppose. They sure banned for it. It looks like SpeedySurfer who wrote the vast majority of the script hasn't posted here in a year. I've also got a set of EVE autoit scripts from back when I played in 2008. A simple mining script, an autopilot script that autopilots with warp-to-zero rather than 10km like the normal autopilot did, and a whole set of newbie ship fitting scripts that I used to fit out mass numbers of ships for newbies to get blown up in. I heard they finally added that as a game feature. Yay.
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Nov 18, 2014 22:44
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Thanks for starting this thread, fun read so far.  I assume if you're new to botting and flipping what you get for cash, you need to prove that you're trustworthy?
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Nov 18, 2014 23:15
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Capn Beeb posted:The honor and integrity of my purely co-op non-competitive gaaaaaaaaame Yeah seriously. Video games are for having fun, if cheating makes it more fun for you go for it. It's a bit different in multiplayer games where your cheating can ruin other players' experiences, but in singleplayer/co-op games who cares.
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Nov 18, 2014 23:30
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LunaDeus posted:I've just been scammed out of $500 worth of archeage gold ... This requires elaboration, sir.
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Nov 18, 2014 23:31
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hackin owns http://youtu.be/jy-jCWaXRzA
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Nov 18, 2014 23:31
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Finndo posted:This requires elaboration, sir. I was selling leftover gold and this guy sends me a paypal business invoice disguised as a payment.  Yes I know, I'm an idiot. 
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Nov 18, 2014 23:59
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It's Paypal, can't you dispute it?
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Nov 19, 2014 00:05
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LunaDeus posted:I was selling leftover gold and this guy sends me a paypal business invoice disguised as a payment. I don't even know what to say about that.
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Nov 19, 2014 00:05
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Shooting Blanks posted:It's Paypal, can't you dispute it? Dispute what, exactly? No money ever changed hands and from the tools used, LunaDeus owed the OTHER GUY money. You could try to lodge a dispute but PayPal has no information to find in your favor on in this case. Also let's just be honest Paypal doesn't care about transactions surrounding MMO gold, if you get your poo poo pushed in there they're gonna laugh at you.
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Nov 19, 2014 00:09
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Coolguye posted:Dispute what, exactly? No money ever changed hands and from the tools used, LunaDeus owed the OTHER GUY money. You could try to lodge a dispute but PayPal has no information to find in your favor on in this case. This basically sums it up. Yeah the image is intentionally misleading (probably why the scam works on idiots like myself), but no money was given or taken away from me. It's just an invoice saying that I paid for something which looks like I was given a delayed payment. Fallorn posted:I don't even know what to say about that. shhhh that tells me enough.
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Nov 19, 2014 00:15
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lmfao @ anyone trying/claiming to make significant money from botting it's a waste of time -- the only way to make any amount of money that matters to an adult living in a western country is to reverse engineer a game early and ship your bot immediately. our forums were always full of nerds trying to think up new stupid ways to use the bot to make money. i guess it's useful if you're a kid. Captain Gordon posted:That sad, there is money to be had in exploit writing for competitive games, but that requires coding skills and a significant time investment to pay off. you don't even need to write exploits. the common theme right now in cheats for competitive games is to start a cheat site, sell a cheat until it becomes popular enough to get detected(large amount of money made in this period), and then get detected over and over every time they update. examples of sites that follow this model: aimjunkies, x22cheats, aimware, tmcheats, etc. they're a dime a dozen. for competitive cheats there's about a single provider who sells a barely-helpful cheat that renders laggy boxes around players through walls(organner) and does little else that is useful in a competitive setting(aimbot/triggerbot is trash because they use kernel-level drawing/reading from process memory) in fact, exploits only have any value in MMOs and even then are usually just logic exploits from randomly guessing at poo poo like ways to dupe things. this requires more determination than skill exploits elsewhere are just used to ruin the game en-masse and rage kids, it's still funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=futHYJbXYsI Daman fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Nov 19, 2014 |
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Nov 19, 2014 01:18
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Hobo Siege posted:What I'll never understand are the morons who cheat in games like Payday 2. I'm not talking about skipping the grind; I'm talking about folks who disable the enemy AI, instapop the vault and all that boring poo poo. It's strictly co-op so you're not gaining an advantage over anyone and you're not ruining anyone's day, so what's the motivation? Why even waste HD space on the game if you don't want to play it? One of the first games that had god mode like this was Doom. It was really fun to turn on god mode and just run around like an idiot. It is still probably fun in Payday 2.
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Nov 19, 2014 01:32
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Bhodi posted:Things are so sophisticated now with dll hooks and poo poo. FFXI has and had some amazing exploits thru the years... The often notorious Taj was a hacker that hosed with FFXI. some of his more known exploits involved really breaking the game. He created the windower plugin "all seeing eye" which simply let you see all invisible NPCs, this had a nice effect of breaking a good bunch of quests. His best antics had to have been the invalid character in chat exploit. Years ago when FFXI was full of highly contested world spawn boss monsters, he found out that if you packet-injected invalid characters into chat, it would immediately crash anyone who heard it. He spent a few hours Completely preventing people from claiming and killing Fafnir, by either shouting and disconnecting the entire zone, or by telling key members like the tank or healers. He followed that up by calling a GM and demonstrating the exploit to him first hand. Other major exploits thru the years for this game include.. Exploiting bazaars. There was a hack in the early years of the game where exploiters could duplicate or steal items from bazaars. This hack also appeared in FFXIV where they could, for awhile, buy items from your empty bazaar for negative amounts of gil, draining your wallet. "Salvage dupes". Salvage was an instanced event that had horribly lovely droprates and could be attempted with 18 people (3 parties of 6 to make a full alliance), but could easily be done with 4-5. Someone found out that if you formed three separate parties of 1 or 2 people and disbanded the alliance before the boss died, if it dropped any items, each party would get their own loot pool, essentially making 3x the drops. This led to a huge banning spree. Cupper, The ever popular Goon made flee hack and clipping tool. Dynamis and salvage exploits. Years after the fact, they turned the event Dynamis from a single group reserved zone event into a 'anyone can enter no matter who's there' event, people found out that if you clipped thru the floor and fell into the void, there was an auto rescue built into the game that would teleport you back to the entrance and reset your timer for the zone. Combined with botting, people were farming dynamis coins nonstop. A similar exploit worked with salvage, people would run thru the event, killing the final two bosses, then clip back up two floors, repeating this until they ran out of time for the instance. netting them several weeks worth of farming in a day.
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Nov 19, 2014 02:08
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Daman posted:lmfao @ anyone trying/claiming to make significant money from botting I don't know. I mean yeah its not worth a help desk job but for some the teenagers who made bank on the diablo 3 auction house, it must have been nice. For grown rear end adults? it's not sustainable and embarrassing.
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Nov 19, 2014 02:14
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How much work do you think it actually takes to write a bot for the d3 ah?
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Nov 19, 2014 02:21
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koolkal posted:How much work do you think it actually takes to write a bot for the d3 ah? You would legitimately make more money just streaming the game if you are half way funny, interesting or are a girl
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Nov 19, 2014 02:26
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this thread is very fun to read. I agree that the vast majority of players botting wont be able to make any real money. I have only ever made money from botting was when I started at day 1. I rush to max level then bot overnight by farming max level monsters for gold. Often times its just something super basic like a keyboard macro that tab targets and spams a bunch of attack button. Its never been hard to sell at 90% the price of gold sellers, especially when a game is still new and your gold per hour potential is higher than most players.
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Nov 19, 2014 02:27
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Kild posted:The bots were so rampant they started immediately back up as soon as the Alpha for DFOGlobal came up to start selling gold immediately and they were so rampant the CEO sent out a letter pleading with them to stop because they didn't want to deal with anticheat on a 4 year old version in a interest check alpha. The global chat was non-stop advertising for gold selling sites even in an Alpha that was going to get wiped in 2 weeks. so DFO was a fun game. from a security standpoint this game was utter trash:
hackshield is a joke to bypass, themida didn't matter after you've got the game running. the chinese hacking scene for this game is super xenophobic and mostly a bunch of copy+paster kids writing things in a language similar to Visual Basic but in chinese. I had a native Chinese speaker go into a bunch of chinese development chat rooms for me to try to find a single person who understood something more than how to copy paste for this game, and he didn't succeed. wrote this during the game's global alpha 
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Nov 19, 2014 02:28
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Fauxtool posted:this thread is very fun to read. I actually really like this thread, but the money making schemes posted earlier were bitcoin-levels of absurd.
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Nov 19, 2014 02:28
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Captain Gordon posted:You would legitimately make more money just streaming the game if you are half way funny, interesting or are a girl  sad but true. Twitch put out those new codes of conducts to stop bikini and lingerie streaming, but I dont think anyone stopped. Those moderately attractive girls make good money playing the game of the month somewhat competently
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Nov 19, 2014 02:31
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Even with "lingerie rules" there will always be people like Hafu (Hearthstone) and Kaceytron (League of Legends) who are literally making thousands of dollars weekly of gullible nerds. I once saw a guy (presumably) donate 1000$ to Hafu on Stream. What the actual gently caress. Anyway, botting - A huge portion of sales from bots are not just gold or material sales in MMO's - simply leveling an account to max level and selling it can also be profitable as account selling tends to be a pretty hard thing to enforce in most MMO's. Also, some sellers recover the accounts after the sale (since they are the original owner) and resell it over and over again to different people, usually until the account gets banned. Captain Gordon fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Nov 19, 2014 |
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Nov 19, 2014 02:35
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Can we talk about the bots that plague steam's marketplace, and those that try to send you phishing links?
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Nov 19, 2014 02:37
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Daman posted:so DFO was a fun game. Thats just silly. Hackshield is such a piece a of poo poo. I have never heard of it working well, just making it hard for legit players. Its super invasive spyware that closely monitors your computer for suspicious activity. Opening notepad while the game window is open often causes the game to crash. A lot of people need to disable their firewall and antivirus just to play the games that use hackshield. Cheaters dont have this problem because the first thing that cheats do is bypass hackshield. One of the more common ways I have run into is to run a self compiled version of it. Awhile back they released the source code for an older version of it. People were able to strip out the majority of the code except the part that says "yes I am running hackshield" to the servers and "yes im running the current version"
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Nov 19, 2014 02:37
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| # ? May 3, 2024 21:13 |
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Most RMT companies function through some combination of 4 things: (1) Buying and reselling (2) Hacking accounts (3) Exploits (4) Bots If they function through #1 then it's often done somewhat privately, and it's with a combination of legitimate players and the people doing 2/3/4. Certain games #4 is viable, like in diablo3 most of the gold came from botting because it was easy as poo poo and clientless bots were developed for that game before the open beta weekend even hit. In games where botting is more difficult or pointless they look toward other methods. In diablo 2, botting is both easy and viable, but because of how easy item duplication is (and other things, that game is wide open for companies like lewt who run like 5 different item selling sites under different names for the same game) the big sites just use exploits. #1 is surprisingly profitable. Players will gladly sell to you for 60% or 70% of what you are selling it for on your site and the turn over is almost instant. #2 is pretty illegal in the US so I never dabbled #3 is super profitable but difficult to discover yourself, and anyone selling these days knows they can make $$$, plus lots of people who sell that kind of stuff are scumbags and sell it to a bunch of people and then it gets patched fast #4 varies from game to game, in some games it's super profitable, in other games it's a waste of time, most of the public bots from the past decade border on waste of time and decent for personal use at best, but that doesn't stop people in poor rear end countries from running as many as they can and making minimum wage selling video game money, but the big sites aren't sitting there using buddybot to do their poo poo Khorne fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Nov 19, 2014 |
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Nov 19, 2014 02:45
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