Author Topic: I missed another cash exploit.  (Read 2764 times)

Prolix

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I missed another cash exploit.
« on: May 21, 2008, 11:51:56 pm »
Dang, who do you have to know to get the heads up on these things? Is there some sly developer putting in bad code every six months and leaking it to his friends? I still haven't figured out how the last ones were done -- not that they work anymore. Guess I should spend more (some) time parsing code to find bad data checking/broken routines.

Done grousing, now to be more serious.

A one year ban is all well and good but is it enough? Is it possible to uniquely identify a player by his ip which may be dynamic? Certainly you can lock that account for a year and any others that you know about but that will not prevent someone from having multiple accounts.Even with a static ip, like I have, it is possible to use something like tor to disguise your ip so it is almost impossible to ban a player.

Here is a suggestion, lock the account so that characters cannot be created or deleted, remove all cash/items, set all stats to 25 and all skills to 0 and finally set up a debt such that 90% of income goes to paying the debt and the debt equals the amount that was gained by the exploit. Now some of the characters on the account may not have been used for the exploit and they will have no debt but all the other punishments will remain in effect.

I am getting pretty tired of all these cash exploits trashing what economy that there is. I understand that that is the price of development but I think more should be done than just ban a few accounts and maybe wipe some cash from everybody. Halfassed measures get halfassed results.

NB guess I was not quite done grousing :)

Donari Tyndale

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #1 on: May 22, 2008, 12:08:12 am »
You assume everyone is like you. However, those people exploiting the bug identify with their characters. The average bug exploiter is stupid, and likely uses the same account. Getting their character, the one they identify themselves with, banned is a serious punishment for them.

Prolix

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #2 on: May 22, 2008, 12:17:28 am »
I have one character I generally play and 4-5 other accounts. If my main were banned for however long I would just play another if I wanted to stick around until the ban wore off and then my main would be no worse for wear. What is a year? goes by in a blink for an old guy like me, a long time for a kid. I did not say you could not ban on top of all the other punishments but to have your main crippled appears worse to me than just put in stasis for a while.

Donari Tyndale

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #3 on: May 22, 2008, 12:24:21 am »
The noobs see it as an attack on their ego. It is worse for them. They want to socialize with their friends through their main character. Getting banned seperates them from their online "friends", it is just like house arrest for a little child. It is terrible for them ;).

neko kyouran

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #4 on: May 22, 2008, 12:28:38 am »
not to go into details, but every account is logged to any IP that is used to ever log in with that account, same with these forums.  then there are sites that you can enter IPs into that tell you exact street information as to where that IP was used at that time, for anywhere in the globe. 

its not hard to make a profile of who you are, where you are, and what you are doing.....

contrary to popular belief, you are not anonymous on the internet.  your actions do come with consequences.  :)

piprees

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #5 on: May 22, 2008, 12:29:37 am »
Another game i played issued punishement in an interesting way -  accounts were not banned or deleted just silenced, unable to interact with merchants, unable to gain experiance, unable to trade or conduct any useful activity - effectively locked out of play.

Can you imagine the torment of being able to enter a game, wander around and not do anything except walk or sit...
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Prolix

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #6 on: May 22, 2008, 01:00:13 am »
not to go into details, but every account is logged to any IP that is used to ever log in with that account, same with these forums.  then there are sites that you can enter IPs into that tell you exact street information as to where that IP was used at that time, for anywhere in the globe. 

its not hard to make a profile of who you are, where you are, and what you are doing.....

contrary to popular belief, you are not anonymous on the internet.  your actions do come with consequences.  :)

There are anonymizing solutions that can make your life much more private. Essentially every connection to an account on your server from someone using one of these will have a radically different ip. Now you could ban accounts that appear to connect from all over the world but some people may have a valid excuse such as frequent business travel. Also people, especially university students, move a lot they also change providers. As for exact street location neko please pm mine to me you should have it available from when you made sure I wasn't Zanzibar. It shouldn't be too hard. Especially if you know my domain name.

You know Donari, I really doubt it is noobs exploiting bugs. I think it is the same people over and over again. Then again "house arrest" isn't that bad if you get to keep all your toys.

piprees, sounds like what they did on some t4c servers!

Hersh Kooh

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #7 on: May 22, 2008, 01:14:52 am »
What about dynamic IPs? I actually doubt common ISPs will hand out detailed IP-info on any random request - or say are you guys collecting all the information about place of origin and whatnot for every IP just in advance and in any case?
I as well doubt the latter (or at least do hope you dont), so would you please enlighten us whats the data you gather from every single player?

Izzabella

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #8 on: May 22, 2008, 01:30:00 am »
Hmm on the IP thing --I've made posts from other locations than simply my home... does that not mess up your data?

And I agree if you ban someone's IP what is to stop them from calling up there internet provider and requesting a new IP?

TDB

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #9 on: May 22, 2008, 01:33:11 am »
  then there are sites that you can enter IPs into that tell you exact street information as to where that IP was used at that time, for anywhere in the globe. 
Heh, I'm sure the RIAA would love to hear about that, it sounds like a major boost to their lawsuit-spamming.

Hersh Kooh

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #10 on: May 22, 2008, 01:54:09 am »
I doubt Neko's description is very accurate, still though I would like to hear an official statement about what sort of data is collected. Any possible?

neko kyouran

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #11 on: May 22, 2008, 02:01:31 am »
again, I stated:

not to go into details

as I don't know all the details on it, and I would liketo try to refrain from saying somethin that isn't true.  :)


but sites like http://tools.whois.net/whoisbyip/  are fun tools and there are many more like it.

as far as I know, any IP ever used to log is thrown into some DB that matches Ip to what account it was used.  Any time that Ip changes, an new record is added to relate account to new IP.

Even with your dynamic IP, unless you are really careful, you will slip up, and log in to your multiple accounts through the same IP, and when that happens, there will be two records for that IP matched to two accounts.   sooooo, it's not that difficult to figure out who's using multiple accounts for things... and then there's simple observation of suspected accounts through the ability to monitor the game through dev/gm chars that are invisible.

bottom line is simple.  cheaters will be caught and they will have to live with their punishments when they are caught.    they can't get a way with it forever.

Zwenze

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #12 on: May 22, 2008, 02:50:56 am »
Arguing about ips wont fix anything. Report bugs and don't exploit them.

Izzabella

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #13 on: May 22, 2008, 02:58:10 am »
Hmm okay another question...what about people that have multiple people playing from the same IP? like family or something? I mean is it fair if someone's brother cheats and now his little sister can't play?

I am just wondering so that we can be fair to all. or is this an issue if it happens the sister needs to contact Kerol and you just deal with it on a as it happen bases?

SerqFeht

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Re: I missed another cash exploit.
« Reply #14 on: May 22, 2008, 03:26:54 am »
Oh man! I still don't know what happened with the last exploit!  :-\

I think that just banning the account that exploited for a year would be enough, and all of the exploited money was erased. If an alt is used to exploit, then there wasn't really any gain if the money was deleted, and then a main being banned would be more than enough punishment.
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