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!

MIRROR HERE

[firepacket]

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?

Re:Too bad servers are down....

[Polymorph2000]

MIRROR:

http://mirrordot.org/stories/46bab61809b5dd9116621 ef0e8bf4d92/index.html [mirrordot.org]

Duping in MMORPGs

[mister_llah]

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) ... ;)

Re:UI in image?

[Donjo]

Seems to be UUI, which is just a package of a bunch of smaller mods. The top bar is called Titan Panel if you want to download just that.

How the sploit works

[ClutchUGA]

From the FoH Boards: Apparently there is a gold dupe that happens when you zone in and out of the orange side entrance of Maraudon. I don't have the details unfortantly, so I couldn't say if its just a huge farce or the real deal. Anyone else able to confirm this? Edit: Apparently this is done with two people. Heres post I found over the issue. New edit is for the title to reflect the fact whole inventories can be duped. "Topic: I just duped 900g! Me and a friend were going to go to mauradon. He put a soulstone on me, then I zoned into the instance, but the loadbar didn't move. A minute later, It put me back outside the instance, and I no longer had a soulstone on me. Thats when I got an idea. I gave all my gold to my friend, zoned in, and when the same thing happened (no load bar, auto-zoned out), I had all my money and my friend had all the money I had given him. "

Re:Duping in MMORPGs

[curtisk]

I was thinking the same thing....UO had Dupes galore, and this one sounds just like one of the bigger UO dupes.

The UO one was get near a "server line" hand your buddy some stuff(gold,regs) walk into server line(laggier the better!) while you are momentarily lagged Alt+F4, quick close UO and force logout, when you log back in if you did it right, your character dropped from UO when it was between two servers, so as a failsafe they roll you back to the last known "good spot", which was when you were on the same side of the server line as your friend, where he still is holding your stuff and since they rolled you back you still have it too...when I started reading the details of this WoW exploit it was like deja vu

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

[jayhawk88]

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.

Re:Noone posting?

[AlexTheBeast]

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?

Re:Common sense

[aredubya74]

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.

Well, maintainence has been extended

[endx7]

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.

[SKorvus]

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.

Re:Noone posting?

[zoney_ie]

Not paying for the priviledge of logging on is also nice :)

I love Guild Wars.

Re:PHOTOSHOPPED image!

[MurdockScottSD]

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:This is why I worried about a Blizzard MMO...

[typical]

Agreed.

MMORPGs are pretty hard to secure (i.e. this single break doesn't seem that bad to me), but Blizzard also had a legitimately bad record going into WoW.

Re:PHOTOSHOPPED image!

[Dachannien]

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.