Left 4 Dead Bug Patched Quickly, EVE Exploit Takes 4 Years 157
Earlier this week, news surfaced that some savvy modders of Valve's Left 4 Dead were able to find a way to enable console commands (meant for the PC version) in the Xbox 360 version of the game. This allowed players to increase the size of their character models to ridiculous proportions, spawn unlimited weapons for themselves (or unlimited enemies for other, unsuspecting players), and go around the map deleting objects as they saw fit. A video posted on YouTube showed how to enable the commands. Valve reacted swiftly to the issues, releasing a patch to disable access to the commands a few days later. Several readers have pointed out another exploit-related story which broke recently; in EVE Online, a bug that was reported and went un-patched for four years has recently come to light, apparently responsible for the fraudulent creation of trillions of ISK, the game's currency. An anonymous reader says that (illegitimate) sales of ISK between players and farmers run on the order of $35 per 450 million ISK.
Eve-online exploit: more information (Score:2, Informative)
Eve-online bug was reported but the GM that handeled the report mistook it for an other bug 4 years ago.
Some players kept exploiting the bug without reporting it again and its effect on eve-online has been "profound" according to CCP.
It is ofcourse impossible to get all the exploit-isk out of the game, we'll just have to live with it. Tech 2 prices are on the rise and the last 2 days have been heaven for market speculators, making billions on market manipulation (a condoned action by CCP)
ISK value and the creation of ISK (Score:3, Informative)
As you can buy in game time for $35 and resell it for ISK at around the 450 million mark, I believe this is what the poster was referring to; this is actually a legitimate transaction and is supported by CCP (this is nice because it sets a cap on the price that gold/isk sellers can charge out of game and allowing indirect regulation). This exploit didn't allow the creation of ISK, just the creation of high end materials for module and ship production. While those sell for a lot of ISK, it is only other players that buy it so the net player isk production wasn't effected.
Culture of Complacency (Score:2, Informative)
I've said it once [slashdot.org] and I'll say it again. PC game developers are complacent about quality. Too complacent. There is in fact a culture of complacency among PC developers. Console developers by contrast, owing to many years of zero patch capability after release, have much, much higher standards and bugs, major and minor are not tolerated to anywhere near the same extent as they are in PC titles.
This problem has not gone away and is only becoming more evident as PC developers attempt to port or move into console development. Almost universally, they run into serious quality issues, allowing bugs, glitches and crashes to occur far, far more frequently that any console player is used to dealing with.
In 1995, I spent over four hours trying to get Discworld to run with sound on my PC. Last month, my brother spent over six hours trying to get Fallout 3 to even play on his PC. In 1995, every single game on the SNES, Mega Drive, and nascent Playstation ran flawlessly from the moment it was turned on. Today, that is still the case with consoles.
PC gamers can say what they like about games on consoles and the people who play them. But one thing they cannot deny is just how solid and reliable console games have been, and continue to be. You put in the cartridge/disc, and the game "Just Works(TM)" from day one. No patches, no bugs, no crashes. This is a standard which PC developers should obviously be reaching from, yet in over a decade, by objective measures, they have not made one lick of progress in this direction.
This complacency is what will spell the end of PC gaming if developers do not get their acts together. People are not going to spend four hours downloading and installing patches for games that refuse to work out of the box when consoles begin to offer those same titles, with the same specs and control schemes. People are not going to keep buying $200 upgrades just to turn something on anymore, when custom hardware consoles offer long term(5+ years) powerful capabilities in just one purchase. People are not going to put up with imbalanced, glitchy or hacked PC games for months in online play, when console developers aggressively pounce on issues and issue automatic mandatory patches within days (Many developers already do this in Xbox360(see article) and PS3 titles).
In short, the culture of quality in console gaming that the PC gaming industry needs to swiftly adopt.
TFS Is Wrong About the EVE Exploit (Score:5, Informative)
No, that's not it at all. I'm not sure how TFS ended up at that conclusion
The bug was a manufacturing bug, similar in some respects to an item duping bug. Certain types of production in EVE are multi-step processes where materials get made in to other materials before everything finally is made in to a finished good*. Players could build certain mid-process manufacturing materials (we'll call the fake materials [stuff]) without needing the materials/inputs normally required to build said [stuff]. This resulted in a lot of [stuff] being made out of nothing that was then used to build finished products. No ISK was ever created since this exploit created [stuff], not ISK. The exploiters could sell their fake [stuff] to other players for ISK, but there was never any more ISK in the game because of it.
Ironically this was better for the vast majority of players who were not in to manufacturing, since the deflation that results from the excess [stuff] meant they could get many finished goods for cheaper than what they should actually be at. The flip side is that correcting this means that prices on the deflated goods are about to shoot up like a rocket, in other words the game is about to hit a period of rapid inflation as the market corrects for the lack of further fake [stuff].
*Specifically, it was an exploit involving Tech 2 manufacturing. The production chain looks like this, and things that could be fraudulently made are tagged with [stuff]: Raw Materials -> Basic Materials [stuff] -> Advanced Materials [stuff] -> Components -> Finished Goods
Re:I hate consoles, and the article is wrong. (Score:2, Informative)
Post to cancel mod.
Not entirely true... (Score:5, Informative)
In terms of complaints about getting a game to run 'at all' or 'with sound at all', that comes down to hardware complexity. No development company will have this sort of glaring omission on any sane console platform, due to the consistency of hardware in the field. You'll note also that PC developers have tweak-able settings for resolution, geometric complexity, etc etc, because they don't know what hardware they are going to run into. It's just that simple. Richer APIs have helped abstract the differences better, but they are still there.
I think the console development issues can be more attributed to the complexity of the platform. Frankly, I don't remember having to acquire many patches before the latter half of the 90s for PC games. Some of the fancier DOS games had issues, but a lot of the DOS games simply didn't have a lot to worry about.
Another complicating factor is the aspect of multi-player games. The mentioned bugs, for example, would not even be worth a patch if it were not a multi-player game. The multi-player aspect requires all bugs that must intentionally be triggered that can provide unfair advantage to be patched. You can find scores of bugs that were exploits in Console history. Final Fantasy 7 W-ITEM underflow bug and Wild Arms Item underflow bug come to mind off the top of my head, The vast majority of patches for modern games have fallen under this category, fixing exploits and fine-tuning balance. This goes for both PC and Console games. Take a look at a single player game and a multiplayer game in the current generation and you'll be hard pressed to find a multi-player game without patches, yet single-player games exist commonly without patches. Before the current generation, internet multi-player gaming on consoles hadn't gotten off the ground, so it wasn't as much a concern, while internet PC multi-player has been common over the last 6-8 years.
And finally, I have seen on occasion games lock up or just glitch in the console world too. Some games released multiple versions of ROM cartridges, and a publisher, if bothered, would exchange an older, buggy one for the new version. It was rarely worth anyone's time to do so, but they still had glitches that slipped past QA. Generally you could avoid them, but still.
Re:What about Castle Crashers? (Score:2, Informative)
They probably just put "sv_cheats 0" in the config files...