Lesson: An attack on Gravity

bleu · Nov 15, 2009, 10:14 PM

Act One: At The Beginning
A player was suspected of illegal activities. Gravity acts to ban him.

Act Two: PayBack
The suspected perpetrator finds his way back to the server. Drops 500 billion worth of items in the main city, causing major chaos and further undermining the authorities.

Act Three: Damage control
Censorship. Any reports of the incident were quickly removed from the forums. No official statement was released.

Act Four: Recruitment
The know-how of how to dupe was intentionally transferred to some players and it eventually caught on. Some players and guilds knowingly become pawns in this fiasco and seeks to reaps the benefits for their own selfish gains.

Act Five: Zero Tolerance
Gravity strikes back and punish those willing pawns by banning them.

Act Six: Second Wave
Players caught retaliated by causing another major chaos; this time directly targeting other players in all major towns. GMs were forced to directly intervene. The cat and mouse game lasted more than 24 hours - players resorted to warn others on forum "No Go Zones"

Finale
Is it over? Who knows?

Additional Info
1. This is not in reference to iRO. Another Gravity's MMORPG. The name of the MMORPG is irrelevant, it could just have happened anywhere.
2. Most of the posts on forum were removed by Gravity, thus leaving very little documentation of it ever happening. But the players know what happens.
3. No official announcement were made about these attacks, it's unclear how were the 500 billion worth of illegal items dealt with.

Discussion: How would you react?
1. How secure is your server? How important is it to ensure the safety of your players and server?

2. Do you think it's important to be open and honest to your players during these times? Players will have questions - Who did it? How? Why? What are you doing about it? Are we safe now? Because there were no official announcements; most details are speculative - were there one person? or more than one persons? etc..

3. Do you really expect they will go away quietly? Newton's Third Law: Every action has a reaction. p/s: IP ban don't work well.

4. There were rumors of a roll-back but it did not eventuate. I suspect most servers would be prepared to track down all the duped items and contain the damage or do a server roll back. But I wonder would any play along as if nothing had ever happened and be disillusioned that duped items will not have any lasting impact on the server?

5. Appeal... GM UNBAN ME PLZ PLZPLZ
It's pretty clear we should punish the real mastermind(s) but what about others?

- Is it an offense to pick up something dropped in the main town? One could have easily claimed that he/she was unaware it was duped.
- Is it an offense to not report to the authorities if you know that your guildmember or a friend is doing something illegal?

- "Did you IP ban the entire country? I run a cyber cafe and I cannot connect!!! I had to re-route the IP to US to post this on the forum."
- "I am innocent. I play from a cyber cafe. I did not do anything illegal."

I suspected that Gravity might have IP Ban the cyber cafe or a certain range of bandwidth from that country as a precautionary measures. Surely we do not seek to punish any innocent bystanders - but how can you differentiate the "guilty" from the "innocence" if they play from a Cyber Cafe.

GorthexTiger · Nov 15, 2009, 10:21 PM

This would be a much better drama topic, if you gave it more details.

Trying to act "OH LAWL I R ANOYNMOUS! !!11" doesn't make it worth dramaing.

*Sigh* Oh well, guess I can sit back and enjoy the flames.

bleu · Nov 15, 2009, 10:26 PM

wat's there to flame? It's not like Gravity will come on this forum defending it never happened. The post was made more of a server discussion purpose; as no server is totally immune to these.

Irrelevant · Nov 16, 2009, 12:45 AM

Each step you take in such cases is usually the worst step and you only do it because option b is/was/will-be also the worst.

Zone · Nov 16, 2009, 12:52 AM

I love attacks on servers.
They make me smile

Loki · Nov 16, 2009, 04:43 AM

Cry if it does.

Omni · Nov 16, 2009, 11:57 AM

Quote from: bleu on Nov 15, 2009, 10:14 PM
Act Two: PayBack
The suspected perpetrator finds his way back to the server. Drops 500 billion worth of items in the main city, causing major chaos and further undermining the authorities.

Wow, that's crazy...

Skotlex · Nov 17, 2009, 04:54 AM

I guess the problem is... you suspect a player of illegal activity, and ban him instead of spying on him to get definite proof? Had they followed the player and checked his activity log, they could have found the source of the problem, fix it, and THEN ban him for breaking the rules.

What they didn't foresee was that the "illegal activity" could be a very exploitable bug, and one that could easily spread into the net and let everyone know about it. Thus that's where everything went wrong.

Orange · Nov 17, 2009, 05:01 AM

Quote from: Skotlex on Nov 17, 2009, 04:54 AM
I guess the problem is... you suspect a player of illegal activity, and ban him instead of spying on him to get definite proof? Had they followed the player and checked his activity log, they could have found the source of the problem, fix it, and THEN ban him for breaking the rules.

What they didn't foresee was that the "illegal activity" could be a very exploitable bug, and one that could easily spread into the net and let everyone know about it. Thus that's where everything went wrong.

Aye,doing a rollback/banning the people is completely useless until you fix the bug, though banning might lead to them spreading how it's done and making fix easier

tracer · Nov 17, 2009, 05:19 AM

Shut everything down. Strave the players into revealing the mastermind. Put out a lawsuit against the mastermind. Spread fear all over Rune Migard.

Has Gravity gotten smarter and decided to open a private RO server themselves? I just thought of that in the midst of this discussion. Ohoho///1/

GorthexTiger · Nov 17, 2009, 03:37 PM

Quote from: Skotlex on Nov 17, 2009, 04:54 AM
I guess the problem is... you suspect a player of illegal activity, and ban him instead of spying on him to get definite proof? Had they followed the player and checked his activity log, they could have found the source of the problem, fix it, and THEN ban him for breaking the rules.

What they didn't foresee was that the "illegal activity" could be a very exploitable bug, and one that could easily spread into the net and let everyone know about it. Thus that's where everything went wrong.

The Barbara Streissand Effect