World of Warcraft Duping Bug Found

Over the course of this morning several people have sent me tidbits talking about an exploit on WoW that allows duping of items. Apparently forum posts are being removed on official channels, but there are a few places where you can learn about the exploit and see screenshot evidence. In equally exciting news, my Rogue on Azjol-nerub is probably 2 hours away from 60 and since Blizzard will undoubtedly fix this bug soon, I'll have to finance my epic mount the old fashioned way!

Noone posting?

Let me guess... Too busy duping items?

Re:Noone posting?

I hear the editors have been exploiting this bug for years on Slashdot...

Re:Noone posting?

I hear the editors have been exploiting this bug for years on Slashdot....

Re:Noone posting?

The vast majority (like World of Warcraft) have devolved into places where it's only fun for the kids who can play for hours and hours each day

That is why I like Guild Wars so much. Lvl 20 max so you don't have to play constantly to reach max lvl. There is still months and months of playtime after reaching max as well as more item drops, etc. I love being able to just jump on any time i want knowing people aren't a couple of weeks ahead of me in lvls now.

Re:Noone posting?

Everybody's too busy looking for mirrored instructions.

Here are some while they last...

Tutorial: (WoW) World of Warcraft Duping Bug and Cheat [tech-recipes.com]

Who knows what will happen to all this gold tomorrow?

Doubt it..

I suspect they are working on putting together a lawsuit.. Doesn't slashdot hold the patent on duping?

In Other News

China's unemployment rate raised 50% this morning due to this bug.

Re:The truth is flamebait!!?

eh, calm down...losing a few mod points isn't the end of the world. They probably though it was flamebaitish because the attitude you took and cursing the guy out. You could have just pointed out (politely) that you didn't appreciate that Slashdot posted links on how to do the hacks. But really, you have to understand...slashdotters are a lot of engineers...we like to break things down and see how they work. If there is a way to mod something, a way to hack something, we want to understand how it works, even if we don't play the game you take too seriously. In any case, the servers are down, this will be fixed...there really isn't a reason to freak out so much. Free yourself...stop caring about mod points, they are meaningless anyways.

Fun game while it lasted.

Fun game while it lasted, now I fear its gone the way of Diablo II. Many servers are allready swamped with duped items. Even if they fix the bugs it would require a roll back to address the economy problems. Such a roll back would cause many players such as myself to pack up and leave (whats the point of spending weeks doing somthing when it will just be undone in the next roll back?).
Ah well, it is just a game after all.

Re:Fun game while it lasted.

I don't know about the rest of you /.ers, but I think the parent comment is hilarious. Look at what we've done: we've created a virtual world with a virtual economy in which virtual objects have value. When a (sort of) economic exploit is found, people worry about the virtual economy. "If people can just duplicate things, requiring a rollback, what point is there to working?" This could be taken straight out of an econ textbook on inflation, deflation, marginal rates, etc. It puts additional insight into the effect duplication has on property rights--even though it's all virtual.

Re:Fun game while it lasted.

Keep in mind that our economy is completely virtual too. Money is just a promise from the government that this particular peice of paper or hunk of metal is worth something useful. Our "real world" isn't as "real" as many people choose to believe.

Re:Fun game while it lasted.

Thanks to the soulbinding system in World of Warcraft, it will never be like Diablo 2. It would take far more than 12 Krol Blades to ruin a server's economy. Those Krol Blades will eventually end up being vendored or disenchanted by their owners as they outgrow them, instead of staying in circulation.

Re:Fun game while it lasted.

No you won't. You and others have spent (wasted) what is probably an extraordinary amount of time in the game already. Why give up after losing just a week or so of changes? You'll accept it, keep playing and maybe grouse about it on Slashdot or a message board somewhere.

Re:Fun game while it lasted.

Fact is, you won't leave.

MMORPGs such as Asheron's Call and EQ and UO have had rollbacks of up to 3 days worth of gameplay at great frustration to the user.

The consequences? Elimination of "most" of the bug's after effects and basically no drop is subscribers logged on. Most gamers of games such as MMORPGs aren't casual gamers due to the amount of time necessary to level, obtain items, complete quests and acquire the necessary in-game knowledge to actually enjoy these games. Therefore, the word addiction comes to mind and you won't leave no matter how much you bitch about rollbacks.

Re:Addiction is right.

"1. I'm an adult. My serious computer game playing days should be behind me."

Why? Do you stop having fun once you reach a given age?

" 2. Is there an end to these things? My only saving grace that let me return to a normal eating/sleeping pattern with games of the past is that they freakin' ended at some point. I don't think I ever would've seen the light of day if I played a game that never ended. Especially if it gave me a poor facsimile of social interaction by being able to communicate with real people inside the game."

Ok, if your an obsessive compulsive type you should avoid these games. However many people such as myself are able to spend a few hours a week playing without getting the shakes.

" 3. How in the world could anyone with a job compete with the people that play this 24x7?"

You cant. So what? Does it make the game less fun for you when the no lifers have better gear or can gain levels faster?

Re:Addiction is right.

1. I play WoW a lot. But I don't play it any more than your typical American watches TV (I don't watch TV). The "no-life" tag almost inevitably is used to mean "someone who has interests I don't share". I don't spend Friday night in a bar, so I don't have a life? Or maybe I don't have a life because I don't go to ball games? Whatever.

2. I spend more than $10 a month on coffee. Hell, I spend more than $10 a month on almost *everything*. If you read a paper with breakfast, you're probably spending about $10 a month. If you're an adult with the wife and the career and everything, $10 a month for an hour a day of entertainment is *cheap*. 3. The "winner" at any sort of game is always going to be the dedicated individual. It's true in sports, it's true in games like chess or poker or backgammon, and it's true in MMORPGs. You're going to feel like a loser if you compare yourself to those people. If the game involves directly competing with them (see online poker) you're going to feel *really* bad. You will probably compensate for your feeling of inferiority (because thats what happens when you lose) by bitching about how they must have no life and yadda yadda. The solution is to play on your own terms and define your enjoyment by your own accomplishments rather than comparing them to someone elses. This is good advice for happiness in general.

Re:Addiction is right.

1. I'm an adult. My serious computer game playing days should be behind me.

grow the fuck up

dealing with the culprit

Hmm... judging by the screenshots...

DELETE FROM user WHERE username LIKE "Gu%en";

Re:dealing with the culprit

W00T!

My sig is actually usefull for once :)

ban them blizzard

All it will take is for Blizzard to parse their logs to look for this. I'm hoping to see some accounts banned.

Too Late

Somebody should have told Leeroy Jenkins about this one.

Common sense

Every server also went down for maintenance this morning and the web is being flooded with news of the exploit. Wonder how long it'll be before the exploit is fixed and the exploiters are banned. Good job blurring the name on the screenshot, but it won't take long for Blizzard to see who has that many epic items for sale on the auction house and put 2 and 2 together. Maybe it's just me, but when I agree to a terms of service, I tend to abide by it the same as I would any other contract. Does nobody care what they put their name to or agree to anymore?

Re:Common sense

Every server also went down for maintenance this morning

It's Tuesday. Every server goes down for maintenance from 9 AM ET to 3 PM ET every Tuesday. Your other question (about how long it'll take to fix) is valid, but the downtime here is planned, expected downtime. If it's not up by 6 PM ET tonight, then I'll start to worry.

MIRROR HERE

in the event that thread is closed or dead: http://www.firepacket.net/wowdupe.html [firepacket.net] BTW, what happened to that "unique id" that each item had that prevented anyone from ever having two of them?

If this dupefix is anything like in Shadowbane..

For every single dupefix, three new dupes are created. Goodbye, WoW economy..

In Shadowbane, the dupes didn't quite kill the game like originally thought. Instead, they reinforced the idea that 'rare' items needn't be that rare for a good pvp game. Rare items usually just mean someone spent more time to get them - and better pvp'ers don't necessarily spend more time playing the game.. So in Shadowbane, if your guild is a good experienced guild, you can completely stock your guilds' characters and many alts with the best pvp gear. Then, it all comes down to organization, experience, and how well each character is built to win in pvp.

PVE is lame. Anyone who has pvp'd in any decent pvp mmorpg knows that. Maybe if Wow's economy gets totally fucked, I'll give it a try. But, hell if I'm gonna spend hours and hours to make a perfect character with decked-out gear that doesn't involve pvp. /goes back to playing Shadowbane.

Re:If this dupefix is anything like in Shadowbane.

PVE is lame. Anyone who has pvp'd in any decent pvp mmorpg knows that.

Well that's constructive. Would you care to explain why?

In the meantime; I like PvE, thanks. I've played Planetside, and Guild Wars, and both have good PvP IMHO, but I prefer generally prefer PvE. It may not be as action packed, but maybe when I get home, and I'm tired, stressing myself out isn't what I want to do.

You're right, I'd have to spend countless hours to get the perfect character, but y'know what, I don't mind, because I don't PvP, and therefore just "pretty good" equipment is fine for me and my PvEing.

DUPE!

This story was already posted earlier [slashdot.org]. Oh wait...

Re:DUPE!

Holy shit! And look at how many karma whores there are posting the exact same comments again!

Duping in MMORPGs

Ultima Online had this problem... a lot.

It really killed the gold market, everything was incredibly inflated because people would dupe 10 million gold checks (which are what they sound like, just a marker for 10 million gold) ...

It's not always trackable if you move it into items... trade it away, buy stuff from stores then resell it... it's like virtual money laundering...

Though that all depends on if/how WoW tracks gold, perhaps they've made improvements over UO (as UO is rather old) ... ;)

Explanation of bug: Ah, a race condition issue...

The reported bug:

On a heavily loaded server: You give your gold/item to a friend. You then enter an instance area. If you load, fine, no bug. If not, and it kicks you out after 1 minute (due to load), you still have your gold.

So obviously what is happening is that the "Failed to load" instance response is going back to some character checkpoint previously created, with this checkpoint being somewhat older.

The fix (which will probably be put in place by now) is to checkpoint the character when he/she attempts to enter an instance. So you aren't gonna be able to exploit this bug anymore. Sorry, 1AM3 CH3373RZ!

Also, if blizzard DID serial # all items, then it will be a pretty simple script to prune the duplicated items. But as they probably don't serial # gold, it might still have some economic disruption.

Re:Explanation of bug: Ah, a race condition issue.

They can still probably catch the people abusing the bug for gold. I know that less than a year after EQ came out, the GMs had available an economic report that showed them who had accumulated an unusual amount of money in a short amount of time.

As their machines got faster and they got more hard drive space, they started logging a *lot* more details. I'll go out on a limb and say Blizzard is doing something similar. I don't know how long the bug was being abused, so it's hard to tell whether anyone at Blizzard actually dropped the ball or whether it was just now being abused to the point where it was easily detectable.

In any case, they certainly know about it now ;)

Re:Explanation of bug: Ah, a race condition issue.

Blizzard absolutely has something like this going on. When they first started cracking down on gold buyers, there were some instances where guild "treasurers" were mistakenly banned because they had insane amounts of gold they were holding for their guild.

People are going crazy over this, but I don't think it's the end of the world. I wonder if a rollback is even necessary. If a character is exploiting this for massive gain, it'll be pretty easy to catch them in the act; either their selling 15 copies of [UberPurpleSword] or they've gone from like 50 to 5000 gold in 6 hours. Those characters that get in under the radar or just exploit it for minimal gain aren't really going to hurt the economy that much. Fine, maybe some characters get a lot of gold or a lot of good items, but so what? The gold will eventually be spent one way or the other, and Soulbound ensures that eventually all the items will become worthless as well.

New jargon word

When the servers come up in the morning the instance server takes about 10 min longer than everything else for some dumb ass reason; So player 1 hands player 2 a stack of gold; Player one goes into instance and about a min later of trying to load gets rubberbanned back to the entrace and has the gold back on him as well as player 2; you keep doing that over and over; You can do it for about 10 minutes!

I know the guy meant "rubberbanded", but it's still a great word.

rubberbanned v. To be repeatedly banned from and attempt to return to a server or IRC channel.

How to fix? Is a fix needed?

For a few days, people have been sitting in Ironforge just giving away gold. I assumed then, and now feel 99% sure, that these were people who'd used the dupes and were trying to muddy the waters - make it so that Blizzard would have to either completely screw over legitimate players who thought they were just getting a nice gift from people on "their side" etc.

So, what can be done to remove this stuff from the environment? Some are suggesting a rollback to the last maintenance spot, making people lose a week of progress (and, presumably, pissing off legitimate people/losing accounts) in order to get the duped stuff out of the economy. Does it even need to be removed?

I, personally, don't really care if it's there or not - the "economy" as it is seems pretty random anyway, and I'm not terribly bothered if some other player has things I don't.

Clearly they need to fix the actual exploit/bug, and hopefully remove the accounts of the people who actually did it (not that that will accomplish anything other than getting rid of a few suburban teens while the people who make real money off this just go buy a few more copies) but is it really that big a deal to the average player?

Well, maintainence has been extended

1. 7/19 - Weekly maintenance extended | 7/19/2005 10:52:00 AM PDT
(Tyren)

The weekly maintenance has been extended while we investigate the validity of the claims regarding a possible exploit in the game. We remind our players that discussing possible exploits on the official forums is a violation of the Code of Conduct, and such threads will be deleted without prior notice.

(http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?f n= wow-general&t=4095298&p=1&tmp=1#post4095298 [worldofwarcraft.com])

Linked screenshot is fake, Blizzard investigating.

The linked screenshot [tokyo-web.org] is plainly edited to show multiple copies of the same item: the texturing behind each Krol Blade item line is identical and there is a cut line horizontally between each one, whereas normally the item line is transparent and the auction window texture should be seamless & varied behind the items.

This doesn't confirm the existence of the bug either way.

Additionally, Blizzard has extended their normal Tuesday maintenance [worldofwarcraft.com] to investigate the duping claims.

What the fuck?

Am I the only one who thinks its absolutely retarded that a link was included with instructions on how to perform the dupe?

Way to go Slashdot. Its always nice to see (semi) mainstream news sites helping people cheat at the online games they play.

It was necessary

For one, anyone curious enough after reading the story could have easily done some research to find out how to do it anyway.

Secondly, news spreading faster will guarantee a more timely fix. Blizzard has demonstrated numerous times that they'll allow bugs that hinder players to sit around for long periods of time without being addressed, while bugs that are exploitable to help players get hotfixed as quickly as possible.

Similarly, obscure exploitable bugs tend to stay around a lot longer than highly visible common knowledge exploitable bugs.

Duping "bug", eh?

If only we could find the duping bug on Slashdot.

Re:Am I the only one who thought of...

Actually, when I viewed the front page, this story was duped. Two completely identical stories, one only viewable for subscribers. After a refresh, it was gone.

I wonder if it was a glitch in the database, a humorous admin, or just the usual dupe getting caught.

Re:PHOTOSHOPPED image!

I threw it into PS and adjusted the levels real quick to see for myself and its clearly a cut and past job. Here are my results side by side with a screenshot I took... Enjoy! http://homepage.mac.com/murdockscott/otherimages/d upeFake.jpg [mac.com] Doc.

Re:PHOTOSHOPPED image!

Actually, the most convincing evidence is that if you log into the game and crank up the gamma, and then crank the gamma on the linked image, you can see that in-game, the background pattern doesn't repeat (at least, not seven or eight times in the window vertically), and the long boxes for each item don't overwrite what's there before - instead, they tint it darker, so even the background inside each item box should be different.

It's clearly not that way in the linked image, so it's decidedly a fake.

That doesn't mean that the problem does or doesn't exist, though.