Discussion on prevention of possible dupes/hacks.

[Magnificence Unleashed RO]

In the past I've heard rumours and ways a player can take to dupe certain items. However I always believed that those involves either crashing of server or abusing crappily coded NPC. I've always thought that the server (eAthena for my case) it self does not have any major loop holes. O boy was I wrong. Just recently I've discovered some major duping (I assumed) of one new guild on my server. They have five +10 slotted infiltrators in one week of time. (impossible to have them with our rates). When I questioned them in hopes of finding the loophole they refused to admit that they've cheated. To control the damage and stop these cheated items from spreading to the healthy part of the community, I've banned every account that came in contact with these items and their IP range as well.
Right now I am stuck wondering one thing. How exactly do they dupe and how easy is it to cheat in a private server running on eAthena? I heard aegis has a good protection against cheats, but eAthena seems to be downright horrible at security measures.

What do you think?

[Skotlex]

Interesting to see both sides of the coin.

[Ansuz Isaz]

I say one thing: Ban me. D=

I'm afraid, from personal experience, I have to side with the "duping" guild. A group of about seven friends played on a guild including me on a 20x / 20x / 15x rate about six months ago, and, considering we've been playing with each other for years, we trusted each other profusely that any effort we put into helping one person wouldn't be in vein. Thus, we had no problems with doing the same thing for the SinX in our guild: make lots of upgraded, slotted infiltrators, for a variety of different cards so that he could use to be multi-effective.

We broke countless numbers of them, spent more money than I had ever made alone, and resulted with about seven +10 slotted infiltrators. Alone, this is completely impossible. However, keep in mind, that this was done with seven people, four of them with endless time on their hands, one who still managed to get on about ~ 5 hours daily, and the other who consistently showed up at least 4 hours. We were able to get the job done impressively well. Edit: [ I realized I didn't put myself into this. xD I had very little life at the time, so I had been able to show up ~6 hours. ]

If we can pull off 7 +10 Infiltrators[1] on a x15 drop rate with one week of playing due to a lack of having any lives, why couldn't they pull off 5 on a x20 drop rate server? o.o

Now, I don't know about these people truly putting that much effort into it, but it's more than possible. Assuming things - as you did just admit you only assumed - isn't any good for the server, as you probably lost very hard working players that would stick around for a while if they did this legally.

[Pandora]

The problem with eA is that many different people work on it (no offense Skot, you're godly but not every dev is), so that's probably how such exploitable bugs can be included. People mean well and everything, but by changing some bits of codes sometimes they open a breach.

What you can do.. try to keep your ears open about that kind of thing. Update the svn when they fix exploits (or add the fix yourself). Headache over logs trying to find who exploited and who didn't. Don't ban without proof.

[Magnificence Unleashed RO]

I say one thing: Ban me. D=

I'm afraid, from personal experience, I have to side with the "duping" guild. A group of about seven friends played on a guild including me on a 20x / 20x / 15x rate about six months ago, and, considering we've been playing with each other for years, we trusted each other profusely that any effort we put into helping one person wouldn't be in vein. Thus, we had no problems with doing the same thing for the SinX in our guild: make lots of upgraded, slotted infiltrators, for a variety of different cards so that he could use to be multi-effective.

We broke countless numbers of them, spent more money than I had ever made alone, and resulted with about seven +10 slotted infiltrators. Alone, this is completely impossible. However, keep in mind, that this was done with seven people, four of them with endless time on their hands, one who still managed to get on about ~ 5 hours daily, and the other who consistently showed up at least 4 hours. We were able to get the job done impressively well. Edit: [ I realized I didn't put myself into this. xD I had very little life at the time, so I had been able to show up ~6 hours. ]

If we can pull off 7 +10 Infiltrators[1] on a x15 drop rate with one week of playing due to a lack of having any lives, why couldn't they pull off 5 on a x20 drop rate server? o.o

Now, I don't know about these people truly putting that much effort into it, but it's more than possible. Assuming things - as you did just admit you only assumed - isn't any good for the server, as you probably lost very hard working players that would stick around for a while if they did this legally.

It is impossible on our server for them. I'll explain why. Infiltrator drops at around 1%. 1/10 chance of success to slot. Getting it from +9 to +10 is 10~20% chance. (not to mention how many they'll break before that). I did some calculation and that is basically impossible for a 4 man guild to obtain five +10s in a week of time. This assumption of possible duping can be made by anyone that has a slight sense of how an eAthena server works.
Here is some updates: Along with +10 slotted infiltrators they have all their gears +9. When I asked them how they dupe they told me that they are just lucky and upgraded with five slotted infiltrators and they got one +10. So then I asked them to upgrade one more +10 for me while I give them 5 non-upgraded slotted infiltrators, they went silent. One more thing, they gave one +10 slotted infiltrator to this new player who joined their guild as a gift.

*edit*

Original here: http://www.ratemyserver.net/forum/server-reviews/muro-server-garbage/0/
So me and my guild have been on the game for around 1-2 weeks now... and we're playing hard... Level 99 in 4 days power leveling and then hunting for items after that... So... We had around 50m total sum of guild money to buy stuff... We bought infiltrators... around 7-10... [1m each on the server vended by some merchant] and we slotted them... With some luck, 2 of the infiltrators were over up'd to +10 and we did the same thing to my other members... Farm loots... Get rich... buy the infiltrators from that merchant... and over up... So apparently the GMs banned us JUST FOR BEING SUSPICIOUS AND NO EVIDENCE...

Thanks for letting me know he posted there.
It's kinda funny to see the kind of things he accused me of doing. Well here we go, 7-10 non slotted infiltrators and 2 of them over up'd to +10. What a joke =(.

[Ansuz Isaz]

The gift thing doesn't surprise me. xD A healthy guild will often do whatever they can to help their new guildies become more useful in WoE

However, I'll grant that the evidence of them going silent - and all of their gears being +9? - is pretty implicatable. o.o; I still stand by it being possible to slot and obtain 5 +10 Infiltrators [1] despite the rates, simply because anyone with enough free time and effective playing could pull it off. All the same, that, and all gears being +9 is a little too much. o_O;

7 +10 Infiltrators [1] in one week with a seven man team was possible for us on a x15 server, but I left out of boredom a month later - I'm an advent server hopper that will generally spend more time on the forums than the game xD -, and we had been still working on getting that high upgraded gear for everyone when I left.

So... Hm. o.o