Shadowbane Hacked, Game Over.
Posted on May 28 2003 by Div Devlin

For those of you still following Ubi Soft and Wolfpack Studios´ spiraling first entry into the MMO market, with their blundered release named Shadowbane, the game is officially over.

Last night, much fun ensued as Hackers accessed the game client giving themselves god mode and access to the developer tools griefing server, after server. Now, I admit. I was one of the most vocal defenders of all Shadowbane stood for. I was one of the uber fanbois who even created a dedicated fan site for Shadowbane.

But at some point, enough is enough. I’ve had enough. Sit back, grab a cup of java and get ready to read this rant. To spare you reading such a long and boring read, the summary is, if you still have an account, you are an idiot.

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Last night around 10pm give-or-take an aspiring individual or group of individuals took over the games client. Running amok within the game, they began changing player bind points to cities. In effect, when a player wanted to return to the city they were attached or called home they appeared in an underwater city, where NPC mobs would attack and kill them. Repeatedly. It was not just a bug that upon logging out would correct upon reentering the game. All cities and players were affected.

The city on the middle of nowhere was named “Buggy Code, Nation –Wolfsack.” Added to it, was the fact that the city is in an inaccessible area from players, with no means of escape and in a short time a few hundred players across several servers were all dead. Naked, and suffering serious experience loss in a game that does have meaning when you die.

Players also had no way to prevent the teleports to their impending doom. Rumors have escalated that player built and owned cites were wiped out of existence, and that guards who were to protect players, had their aggression level tweaked and went on random killing runs while invulnerable. Within the desert safe hold of one city a group of players all tagged with the famous beta Empire name of Rolling 30’s had wiped out every player and NPC, leaving behind only gravesites of heads-on-a-stick. Death had come.

We do not think this was the featured event that Ashen Temper and his event’s team were leading up to. Maybe it’s the Noah expansion pack, the city flooded, is underwater, noah boats, noah experience, heavy rains inundate Aerynth, expansion to be called “Lost Trials of Aerynth.”

Aquaman was overhead saying “Finally a game for me.”

The events began moving server to server, with the names of the guilds changing to reflect the server’s most dominant guilds. Rolling 30’s, Covenant of Swords, even The Combine and Ebonlore have been accused.

This has been a serious issue since the launch of Shadowbane that has been echoed by the Community repeatedly. Now, the game may have just been breached by a couple of script kiddies who found a way to access the games client. Maybe not!

Data Servers were unprotected. Account Logins were never protected. Run a password crack pounding the servers on say, Meridian and hackers can gain access to any developer, CCR or Featured Character, with instant access to god mode. Perhaps they left the code for god-mode in the client, similar to Ultima Ascension where a player could go behind a tree in that game and flip-a-switch and instantly be in god mod. Everyone knew this was going to be an easy hack, when one account uses the same password to access the game. If the hacking was even done by satellite DSS there is never going to be anyone caught.
While this was not a player attack and an actual client attack all we can say is, “We told you so!”

Which leads us to the next question, “If the game can be hacked and if the login servers can be hacked, just how secure is our Credit Card information after all?”

Why is it, that when issues are raised to publishers or developers they are ignored? Most of the people I know are industry professionals all in Computer Operations, Data Programming, as well as Data Security. But, because were just customers we get ignored, while feedback from developers go to college kids in their 20’s catering to what they would like to see in game, instead of addressing the serious issues that need to be fixed?

Ubi and Wolfpack were in fact quick to respond, shutting the servers down, getting fixes in place, and announcing that they would prosecute the individuals involved when caught. But really, with the lack of tools Shadowbane has not had, are we the paying players expected to believe that you have logs showing what occured?

Everyone told me so, and they were right. The sad part about this is the disaster recovery plans were not fully thought out. Players that were affected may need to wait up to 72 hours to have their characters “manually” restored before they were victimized.

All I want to know is what happened to, “The game will be released when it’s ready!” that Warden would always tell us? With all the bugs, with all the server problems, with the memory leaks, and client crashes, this latest incident nails the coffin shut on Shadowbane as more players cancel their account before the next billing cycle this week. For those, at least who have not already been billed or did not sign up for yearly subscriptions.

Bridgette Patrovsky and Jessica Mulligan wrote a book on making MMO games, where a number of MMO industry professionals who have been through all of these problems give insightful information about the mistakes being made, perhaps folks from Ubi and Wolfpack should, like, Read it.
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