HAX Gets WAXed
filed on Monday, October 24, 2005 at 1:58:19 AM CST

There was this guild on Ultima Online called HAX.  They were recently busted for duping items on UO.  Duping, for those of you who haven't ventured into MMORPGS (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), duping is essentially exploiting an error in the programming to force the computer that operates the game into "accidentally" duplicating an item.  For instance, in this case, HAX duplicated several high-value artifacts in the game.  These artifacts are worth millions of gold each (some upward of 40,000,000 gold pieces a piece).  Yes, those numbers are pretty impressive.  It's not exactly easy to make 40,000,000 gold overnight, and obtaining the artifacts of this level typically involves a lot of luck.

Now, take into account that 1,000,000 gold can be purchased for $2 to $4 on average via ebay, one artifact can be worth, in real U.S. Dollars, $40 to $80 each.  And yes, believe it or not, there is a thriving gold market.  Me, I think it's bad enough I have to pay EA money when I want to upgrade to the latest expansion or buy another box full of in-game trinkets... I'd never buy an account or gold off of ebay, because it just seems to me that's defeating the purpose of the game.

Still, there are others who believe time is money, and if they can spend money to save time, so be it.  Considering that at one point, 1,000,000 gold used to run about $19.95, many years ago, $2 to $4 is a bargain.  The market on gold "crashed" a bit because it got easier to make.

Now, EA, when they learned that HAX was responsible for these mass-dupings, they took action, and started banning the accounts of the people responsible.  They erred on the side of getting these greedy little fuckers off of the server, and started banning all accounts who were an active part of HAX, and all accounts who were linked via credit card, address, email address, you name it.  It was EA's way of saying, "Pack your bags, boys, and get the hell off our servers!"

The problem is, like all things internet, there is no fool-proof way of banning someone from your service.  They could get a parent or friend to use their credit card.  They could lie about their address.  Free email services are a dime a dozen these days.  Someone who so desperately wanted to continue playing would simply cancel their current ISP and sign up with a new one, presuming it was dial-up.

Of course, HAX was also responsible for exploiting a bug that, somehow, created multiple peasants (in-game non-player characters [NPC, or computer-controlled entity, basically]).  They filled and filled and filled and filled the local area server with these NPCs, which, causing the computer to engage in far more processes in an area than it was designed to deal with, would eventually cause the server to crash.  The dupe trick, of course, involved crashing the server.  Historically, this has been the best way to cause the server to create dupes.  I have no idea the exact routine, but that's how it was done.

Here's the thing though... doing this kind of thing not only gives those players a seriously unfair advantage in the game because they chose to exploit a bug, but when they start causing things like server crashes, they rob general players not only of the ability to log-in while the server reboots, but also cost them lost game-time, because the server, when it comes back up, reverts to the last saved point.  That can be upwards of a couple of hours, and sometimes data's been corrupted so bad that they had to revert shard up to 24 hours previous.

Now, you'd think that in the face of losing all of their accounts, they'd take stock of the stupidity that roll in.  Well, if you didn't understand the nature of someone who has to cheat in order to win a game.  We're not talking about friendly cheating either (like when you steal $500 from the bank in Monopoly when the banker gets up and goes to the bathroom), we're talking about serious, high-level cheating that, realistically, could have netted these assholes approximately $40,000 in cash combined.  And believe me, if they had made it to that point, it would only have gotten worse.

Well, they have absolutely no remorse.  In fact, they're already planning on letting the heat cool down for a bit, get their accounts rolling again, and start all over.  Of course, they're so stupid, they'll get busted again, of that I'm confident.  When they come up with stupid ideas like, "HAX is back" will be the new guild name (spelled XAH... get it?), you can believe that they'll be in trouble again soon.

The irony, of course, is that there are also guild members who claim they didn't know what HAX was doing.  That they were only there for the PvP (player vs. player combat... fighting another player instead of computer-controlled enemies).  That they had no idea that a guild named HAX was doing anything remotely wrong.  They claim that they chose the name because everyone used to claim how they were using hacks to win at PvP.

The only problem with that story is that in order for them to have gotten that reputation in the first place, they'd have to have gone out and PvPed in the first place.  Which means that when they first started out, the name HAX would have been silly, because no one would have known what to expect from them.  Now, possibly they had a different name, and then disbanned their guild, and created a new one called HAX.  I'm leaning toward the fact that these little idiot-boys were up to tricks all along.  Heck, they couldn't even play at PvP without using what's known as a "stump hack," which forces the UO client to replace tree graphics with tree stumps so that you don't have to worry about the trees getting away of your targeting.

It's absolutely funny to me that they are crying about how they got caught.  It also absolutely scares me that they haven't learned a thing from it except that next time they should be more careful.

Still, let's have some faith that at least a few of these pubescent globs of vomit won't be back in-game.