EverQuest II Economy Hacked

[Yoshi]

Sony claims that a group of hackers illegally created a huge amount of EverQuest II currency over the weekend, and it says the players caused the game's economy to suffer 20 percent inflation in just 24 hours before being caught.

According to Chris Kramer, director of public relations for EQ2 publisher Sony Online Entertainment, the players had, on Saturday, begun using their so-called "duping bug" to make large quantities of platinum, the game's currency. (A duping bug is a hack that exploits a weakness in online games' code to effectively create counterfeit currency or other goods.)

The players then began trying to sell the ill-gotten plat on Station Exchange, the official auction exchange for EQ2 weapons, armor, currency, and other virtual goods. "The amount of money in the game increased by a fifth in about 24 hours," Kramer said. "We have a lot of alarms for this kind of thing, and they all went off on Saturday."

The economy of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game was quickly brought back to its preattack state, Kramer added.

SOE launched Station Exchange last month. The auction system lets EQ2 players that wish to buy or sell the game's virtual goods for US dollars do so in a system overseen by the company.

But many players of online games, such as EQ2, are opposed to such trafficking, mainly since it gives people with money to spend an advantage over those who put in the time advancing their characters manually. So SOE has segmented EQ2 into discrete servers, some of which allow the trading and some of which don't. Players from the two kinds of servers cannot play against each other. In any case, Kramer said that after discovering the duping bug on a Station Exchange-enabled server, the company's customer service team quickly shut down the auctions to stop the sale of the artificially created platinum. Once the team identified the hackers, it immediately shut down their accounts. Sony does not disclose the names of its players.

Kramer also said that SOE has tools that allowed it to track all the duped platinum so it could remove it. Thus, he said, while the EQ2 economy had taken a huge inflationary hit on Saturday, the company's customer service team put in a lot of overtime over the weekend. As a result, the problem was largely resolved by Sunday.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/08...s_6130888.html

[Opaque]

Who cares about EQII?

[Thief Silver]

Well I still do kinda I guess, but anyone who cares about EQII couldn't possibly care about it's economy, cause that was fucked up a long time ago.

I just like the character creation process.

[Zerodash]

Yoshi, why do ya need to add a political comment (referring to the thread topic subtitle) everywhere?

[Sl1p]

I just like the character creation process.

I was excited about EQII up until I got finished with this process and actually had to play the game

[Thief Silver]

Seriously, I think that's my biggest problem with WoW, it's not nearly as creative as EQIIs.

[Sl1p]

OH GOD HERE WE GO~

I agree and it's the reason why I've put more time into The Matrix Online than I have into WoW. I mean, besides the complete lack of content, interesting things to do, and social experience, WoW has gives the user absolutely no creative control; at least nothing that can even come close to touching EQII, Star Wars Galaxies or MxO.

Whenever I played WoW, I felt like I just came off an assembly line.

[epmode]

CONTROVERSY!

[Thief Silver]

OH GOD HERE WE GO~

I agree and it's the reason why I've put more time into The Matrix Online than I have into WoW. I mean, besides the complete lack of content, interesting things to do, and social experience, WoW has gives the user absolutely no creative control; at least nothing that can even come close to touching EQII, Star Wars Galaxies or MxO.

Whenever I played WoW, I felt like I just came off an assembly line.

I agree for the most part, just EQII doesn't have the variaty of equipment graphics WoW does either.

I probably wouldn't be that huge of a fan of WOW if I didn't get to play with TNLers, in fact I'd probably still be playing EQII.

But then I remember that XP penalties make those games even more tedius than they can already be.

[Mzo]

I would like any MMO that we were all playing on, I think.

WoW is just easy to get into... like a compromise between the mindless fun of City of Heroes and the tear-inducing drudgery of grinding for years in SWG.

It definitely could use more customization in the character creation department. I wanted a fat dude =/