> then I wouldn't have been able to exploit the bugs for nearly ten years.
Holy shit, what game was this and in what ballpark did you raise selling duped items for nearly 10 years!? That's a story right there. Did you ever get caught?
As for rewards in virtual games... it's just a lot lower priority I guess, as it's all virtual. There's no direct loss to the company if someone is able to dupe items, unless it's really widespread, but in that case it's very noticeable quick (system wide deflation, fewer boss runs / grinding, rapidly rising item counts). It upsets the game balance and affects enjoyability (which indirectly affects subscriptions and thereby company profits), but it's not direct money out of the company's pockets (unless it's a shitty game where you can directly buy items with real money. In that case it can dampen revenues fairly quickly).
> flags should be set to trigger notifications of unusual activity in order to mitigate damage from exploitation.
I was an admin for a while and had access to every single chat log. It's pretty scary how privacy in virtual worlds doesn't at all exist, nor is there any debate about it that I know of. I'm sure companies like facebook or WoW have restrictions and various policies in place, but in a lot of games an admin will be able to simply read your chat. I frequently had to look into reports of things like racial slurs in private chats to warn or ban users (and yes, people indeed fake-reported other users they hated, so I always had to check the logs for evidence), and just scrolling through the convos you'd scroll past the craziest private things. In my early teens a decade ago now I couldn't help but read some of them. (morally pretty embarrassing to say). Anyway, as to the relevance of all this, needless to say every.single.time an exploit was found, you'd have users telling their friends in private chat IN game. You could search the logs for 'admin' or 'secret' or 'exploit' and you'd find messages like this 'Dude, keep this a secret cause admins will find out, but I just found a money duping exploit'. Anyway no admin ever did searches like this in practice, but it was pretty easy to build a flagging system. We eventually did build a proper flagging panel with charts of total credits in the game, or total unique boss items, or total XP earned. There'd trends for the time of the day in the US/Europe mostly, and trends for the day of the week (monday low, saturday high), and you could easily see deviations from that with exploits. In short, everyone always tells their friends, and not out-of-game either, and they almost always go full retard and become insanely wealthy in the span of days. Also, when veteran players complain of another player hacking, it almost always ends up being true after tons of denial. And it usually takes long to fix because almost half of the time the hacking player is a veteran player who is respected, trusted, well-connected and at times in partnership with admins who play themselves. Man online games are awesome, it's like the bold and the beautiful sometimes haha. Haven't played any in years though, wish I had the time I did as a teen! Feel free to share your stories! :)
> hopefully my comment won't evoke responses that focus on my mistake alone
Really don't care :P It's a game, and somehow, the drama of stuff like this is what made persistent online games so much fun. (talking about games like EVE online here, for games like counterstrike cheating is simply never fun or funny). For example check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrYe_4vHzgE Mostly based on a story of two corporations vying for wormhole space based on cheating, completely awesome and epic
The game where I reported the first bug was D2. The game I was referring to in the last paragraph was WoW. I used 4 different methods over nearly 10 years to exploit the same bug. The first 3 produced an error message when the item duplication was unsuccessful. It was only unsuccessful ~10% of attempts, but I was careless enough to cause too many error messages to occur in a short period of time. I believe that's why they were patched. However, the game devs didn't investigate enough to realize my intent when causing those error messages. So they neither took action against my accounts for using the exploit (though my accounts were closed for exchanging items for real money), nor did they ever fix the underlying bug that allowed item duplication. They just fixed my methods for exploiting the bug. Then, I'd find a new method and continue.
I made enough to pay off a car, credit card debt, student loans, build a small chunk of savings, make a small down payment on a house, and live free of financial stress for a few years. It helped me immensely when I was desperate, but it didn't end very well. I wrote more about it in my blog listed in my profile. Here is an HN discussion about one of the posts that generated some interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8439648
I believe he's talking about Diablo 2 (the timeframe works, and the game is notorious for duping), in which Blizzard provides shady third party companies with items, which are then sold to users.
Holy shit, what game was this and in what ballpark did you raise selling duped items for nearly 10 years!? That's a story right there. Did you ever get caught?
As for rewards in virtual games... it's just a lot lower priority I guess, as it's all virtual. There's no direct loss to the company if someone is able to dupe items, unless it's really widespread, but in that case it's very noticeable quick (system wide deflation, fewer boss runs / grinding, rapidly rising item counts). It upsets the game balance and affects enjoyability (which indirectly affects subscriptions and thereby company profits), but it's not direct money out of the company's pockets (unless it's a shitty game where you can directly buy items with real money. In that case it can dampen revenues fairly quickly).
> flags should be set to trigger notifications of unusual activity in order to mitigate damage from exploitation.
I was an admin for a while and had access to every single chat log. It's pretty scary how privacy in virtual worlds doesn't at all exist, nor is there any debate about it that I know of. I'm sure companies like facebook or WoW have restrictions and various policies in place, but in a lot of games an admin will be able to simply read your chat. I frequently had to look into reports of things like racial slurs in private chats to warn or ban users (and yes, people indeed fake-reported other users they hated, so I always had to check the logs for evidence), and just scrolling through the convos you'd scroll past the craziest private things. In my early teens a decade ago now I couldn't help but read some of them. (morally pretty embarrassing to say). Anyway, as to the relevance of all this, needless to say every.single.time an exploit was found, you'd have users telling their friends in private chat IN game. You could search the logs for 'admin' or 'secret' or 'exploit' and you'd find messages like this 'Dude, keep this a secret cause admins will find out, but I just found a money duping exploit'. Anyway no admin ever did searches like this in practice, but it was pretty easy to build a flagging system. We eventually did build a proper flagging panel with charts of total credits in the game, or total unique boss items, or total XP earned. There'd trends for the time of the day in the US/Europe mostly, and trends for the day of the week (monday low, saturday high), and you could easily see deviations from that with exploits. In short, everyone always tells their friends, and not out-of-game either, and they almost always go full retard and become insanely wealthy in the span of days. Also, when veteran players complain of another player hacking, it almost always ends up being true after tons of denial. And it usually takes long to fix because almost half of the time the hacking player is a veteran player who is respected, trusted, well-connected and at times in partnership with admins who play themselves. Man online games are awesome, it's like the bold and the beautiful sometimes haha. Haven't played any in years though, wish I had the time I did as a teen! Feel free to share your stories! :)
> hopefully my comment won't evoke responses that focus on my mistake alone
Really don't care :P It's a game, and somehow, the drama of stuff like this is what made persistent online games so much fun. (talking about games like EVE online here, for games like counterstrike cheating is simply never fun or funny). For example check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrYe_4vHzgE Mostly based on a story of two corporations vying for wormhole space based on cheating, completely awesome and epic