"In the early days of EverQuest, a cheater and designer waged a secret war from ..."

[loramin]

Just wanted to share this fun article with stories of EQ's early days:

https://www.pcgamer.com/in-the-early...-gaming-store/

It has great stuff like:

He liked to have fun with the spells, too. A popular early website with information about EQ was Caster's Realm, run by an Australian named Greg Short. One of the site's biggest draws was a detailed list of the game's spells. They got a lot of this information by scraping beta server patch notes, which was not without some risk. "One year, right around April 1, I put up a patch to beta where I nerfed the most popular spell of every class except one, whose signature spell I buffed," GZ says. "I just put it up with no notes as a friendly reminder that what went to beta was for testing. It's the only time I've ever been called at 1am by my boss. Brad called me up and went 'the forums are on fire, what did you DO?'"

[Tywulf]

Funny you post this, just read the article myself. A fairly eye opening look at the early days.

[tadkins]

One was for a little-known quest that involved a thirsty dwarf and a liquor called Tumpy tonic. By going from the dwarf capital of Kaladim to the Ocean of Tears, you could buy some Kiola nuts from a friendly elf. Once you waited for the boat again and returned to the dwarven homestead (a round trip that took well over an hour), you could give the nut and a flask of water to the man, the myth, the legend himself—Tumpy Irontoe—and receive a flask of his tonic. Then you took that brew back to the thirsty dwarf in Freeport (another hour), handed it in, and got a bit of cash and some experience.

I'm glad that quest survived, one of my favorites in the game. xD

[loramin]

Originally Posted by tadkins [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm glad that quest survived, one of my favorites in the game. xD

And ultimately the Caster's Realm guy who found the exploit wound up becoming a MMOG dev himself [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Kich867]

The funniest part of this was at the end learning that that guy ended up working on New World, I'm surprised they even remotely cast him in a good light hahaha.

Eventually David found himself on the other side of the screen. In 2017, he joined Amazon Game Studios and worked on New World as a senior game designer and product management lead up through the MMO's launch. More than 15 years after his shenanigans at Game Empire, he needed to fortify his project against the kinds of attacks he was once famous for. Using the same mindset he applied to Tumpy tonics, he worked with alpha players to find weaknesses in the game's systems and economy.

Note, New World suffered / still suffers(?) from some of the worst economy exploits ever and it basically tanked the entire game. There was a video detailing every problem with it and how it's still fucked today because of how unbelievably poorly they built the game.

They had to try and manually undo how fucked their economy was and then fucked up doing that and handed people absurd amounts of money.

The economy, while not the only thing that wasn't working in New World, is easily the most important one haha.

Not to mention, if I recall from the video, the economy exploits were some of the laziest, simplest kind of exploits. This dude put literally zero actual effort into identifying them, and for their software engineers to not build the backend to avoid some of them is laughable. Literally all you needed was a lag switch. You'd trade gold to someone, hit your lag switch, the backend registered the gold to the other person and never took it from you, repeat forever for infinite money.

If you're bored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3ZMly9YAPA

what a cluster fuck of a game, glad I never played it.

[Chortles Snortles]

ouch

[unsunghero]

I remember hearing about the duping exploits in New World. That game was chock full of other exploits too

I remember at one time they had a lot of their char data client side not server side, so people were hacking all sorts of stuff

There was a way where they could put a link in chat and if you clicked it, it crashed your game too

[Kich867]

Originally Posted by unsunghero [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I remember hearing about the duping exploits in New World. That game was chock full of other exploits too

I remember at one time they had a lot of their char data client side not server side, so people were hacking all sorts of stuff

There was a way where they could put a link in chat and if you clicked it, it crashed your game too

Yeah, not sure if this is the one you're talking about but, there was apparently some item that you would equip, it would give you a huge damage boost or something, and then even when you unequipped it, you just permanently had the damage boost.

Another huge blunder was that, they essentially changed how XP worked, so everyone that played the game early got to max level in no time, anyone afterward has an extremely tedious grind up to max. Just a complete shit show of a game.

It also doesn't help that it was originally meant to be a primarily PVP game about territory control, which sounded cool, but because it's Amazon and it had to be a "global phenomenon" they basically gutted all of the PVP out of it, tried to turn it into WoW in the last few months, and bungled the entire thing.

[cd288]

I don't necessarily blame the dude in the article for the state of New World. It was pretty clear that the suits pushed this one out before it was ready. The dev team could have done so much more if they were given a bit more time, but they weren't.

I'm guessing that since it's not a subscription model, corporate felt like the hype was there to get a ton of game sales and didn't care about longevity after that.

The most absurd part about the whole New World saga though was when some people refused to buy it because "it supports colonialism"...it's a game about finding a mystical island filled with undead that you kill not some freaking natives. So stupid.