Talk:Duping (video games)

Urban legend?

The following text from the article was recently deleted without explanation:

Duping was also at the center of a mass banning of players on Star Wars Galaxies. In Galaxies some characters learned how to dupe the currency, "credits". Sony Online Entertainment banned players who possessed duped currency. It is alleged that people who were not directly involved in the exploit, but who accepted duped credits in legitimate trade were also banned. In reaction to what was perceived to be an unjust punishment, several players joined a mass demonstration at a central location. Sony Online Entertainment responded to the disruption caused by the large gathering by teleporting all player characters involved away from the demonstration area (a popular on-line urban legend is that many player characters were teleported into space, essentially killing them. Although evidence as to whether or not this occurred cannot be substantiated, it has been voiced in many popular gaming avenues, such as Penny Arcade).

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- Another method to mitigate the effects of duping would be a game-wide rollback, in which all the data in the game world is reset to an earlier data backup prior to the first known instance of duping. This could be a highly unpopular decision with the gameplayers and is best done before much time has passed.

I have reverted it. However, if this is controvercial, it should be discussed. Gaius Cornelius 23:12, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

There is absolutely no sourcing for the article and I am half-inclined to Nominate it For Deletion until someone can get more than word-of-mouth onto this page. Not professional. There isn't even a viable timeline so there is no way to know if this happened recently or long ago or in some distant galaxy. Research. Vaguely 15:23, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

I completely agree. I largely re-wrote the article, with some emphasis on an EQ2 dupe that was covered by ZDNet in 2005, added several references, and removed some uncited and generally unqualified text. Hopefully it'll encourage some more verifiable coverage of the topic at hand. --Mrwojo 07:26, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Penny Arcade reference

Anyone have a reference link to the Penny Arcade page mentioned? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 192.160.64.49 (talk • contribs) 07:22, 3 April 2006.

Now added: [1]. --Mrwojo 07:17, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Missing topics

There's a lot of things not currently covered in the article. If you are looking for something to write about, see if you can find some good sources for the following:

Common methods:

• It seems most of these bugs are situations where a player has an item, puts it somewhere (on the ground, in trade, etc.), and then manages to revert their character to a state when they still had the item (by zoning, disconnecting, etc.).

Detection:

• Automated detection: What kind of automated detection is there (server-side, client-side, etc.)?
• Other more "manual" types of detection, such as visually or by checking server logs.

Effects:

• On a related note, how does the duping of an isolated set of items affect the economy? The article mentions, but doesn't cite, a story about rare items in RuneScape being duped into massive devaluation. But what about the value of the 2nd best item? Basically, how does this affect the economy in a mudflation sense?
• There is currently no citation for item dupes causing deflation. Devaluation might be local to the specific types of items duped, and it might actually cause inflation if the duped items are sold to NPCs.
• Have dupes been used for quest items (i.e., experience points)?
• There's little or no mention of how dupes affect those who use them. (Phat lewtz, or maybe that's clearly inferred.)
• There's little or no mention of how a dupe-ridden economy affects gameplay.

Response:

• I recall hearing about special money/item drains being setup in response to duping in Ultima Online. [2]
• Has there ever been any lawsuits regarding duped items being traded for real cash?

Notable cases:

• It appears that BlackSnow Interactive might have been using duping (in part) for their RMT business.
• WoW?, Diablo II?

Feel free to add and remove stuff from this list. --Mrwojo 08:09, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

DragoonWraith 03:48, 24 February 2007 (UTC): Diablo and Diablo II both had very significant duping, might be worth mentioning. Blizzard has gone to rather large lengths to limit it, with some (but not complete) success. The D2 v1.10 patch and the introduction of the "Rust Storm" may be worth mentioning. In fact, despite Diablo II's age (the Lord of Destruction expansion was released in 2001), just this weekend Blizzard made some updates to its servers to eliminate a prominent dupe method that had been publicly released around Christmas time (the particular method involved creating very large amounts of lag [not uncommon, as I mentioned below], and Blizzard ended up changing the servers to kick you from a game before you ever reached high enough latency to pull off the dupe). These seem relevant, though I'm not sure they're really big enough to warrant inclusion; I leave that decision to more active Wikipedia editors.

Lag

DragoonWraith 03:38, 24 February 2007 (UTC): Very often, dupe methods involving large amounts of lag on the server, in an effort to cause the appropriate rollback (i.e. back to when you still had the item you just gave your friend, so that you both end up with the same item). Dupes may mess with a virtual economy, but often the massive amounts of lag has a much greater affect on legit players than does the craziness of the economy. I have no sources other than my own experience, otherwise I'd write it myself, but can anyone write a reasonably good section on this?

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