Players who attack pirate servers
imaekgaemz.com » On Player Loyalty
After finding a pirate Meridian59 server…
I spend the rest my time in this illegal world schmoozing with the admins, trying to finagle server access to cause a little havoc. After an hour or so of this, everyone on the server is killed by an admin command (I didn’t do it.) Amidst the OMG WTF NOOB ADMIN broadcasts from all the players who just lost their last hour of character building–and all the gear they had, I notice there are are two new admin characters logged in with the names “Psychochild” and “Q.”
While laughing my ass off, I call Brian hoping to hear his trademark cackle while he and Rob wreck another pirate server… but he has no idea what’s going on. “So wait,” I say… “You’re not logged into this server right now?”
No, he wasn’t– So I log back on and start talking to the false PC and Q. — Long story short, it turns out that they are two old players from NDS’s Meridian59 who don’t play anymore, but have taken down quite a few pirate servers.
An interesting read. 🙂
27 Responses to “Players who attack pirate servers”
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Interesting.
One does wonder how this happens exactly, as in what mechanism makes it happen.. because for some MMORPG’s (most notably Ragnarok Online, to my knowledge) have many (possibly hundreds) of pirated servers that operate largely unmolested.
Even WoW has pirated servers running.
While I do not have a lot of experience with mainstream MMORPG’s I did spend quite a bit of time on an MMORPG called “TerraWorld”. I worked my way up and ultimately ended up being the “head admin” and the right hand of the server owner.
We experienced this type of stuff all the time. If you are not familiar with Terraworld it is based on the very old FSO engine, but had been vastly rewritten and was by far the most successful FSO game out there.
Many other “owners” tried to duplicate our server by stealing our tiles and coppying our quests and such. And when this would happen we would hear stories about some of our players going to those games to grief or badmouth them or even try to bring it down. And of course, their players always tried to do the same to us.
As far as I know, Terraworld still exist… (Good Job Fvantom!!!) and is still being played by some of the most ultra loyal players on the net.
http://www.terragaming.net/
Link to the game if you are interested.
One does wonder how this happens exactly, as in what mechanism makes it happen..
Well, first you need player loyalty. And then you need sufficiently savvy and capable players…
But this reminded me more of killing doctors who gave abortions than anything else. Or gang wars, though that’s probably only because I saw City of God last night, heh.
I think gang wars is the more apt of those two, gang members getting pissed off and some other gang trying to muscle in on their turf. It works… And it’s not nearly as hypocritical as the first one… eee
Griefers never do you any favors. If you design around the concept of using them as an external threat to unite communities, they’ll infiltrate the communities and tear them apart from the inside. And if you ban them from your world, they’ll happily go grief the pirates… but that’s to stoke their own glee in causing misery, not out of any loyalty to your game, and if you let them back in they’ll unleash all the tricks they’ve learned on the pirate servers against you.
It’s not that they’re evil-minded little jerks, per se, it’s just that they’re playing a whole different metagame than the rest of us.
Pirates attacking pirates.
A problem that takes care of itself.
Why does anyone care about Meridian59 enough to make a private server?
Is Brian “Psychochild” charging for his?
—.—
It’s $10 a month to play Meridian59 now. And the players that are still there care a lot about the game.
Since this happened, it turned out that the owners of the pirate server are also players who were banned from the official Meridian59 game.
Ok, it’s time to admit ignorance yet again. How the heck does someone create a pirate server?
…and why isn’t there one for pre-cu SWG? 😉
There is. Google: “SWG Pre-CU Emulator”
Why does anyone care enough about an emulated server to go after it?
People take the internet VERY seriously.
In fact, people seem to take the internet more seriously than real life in some cases. Probably because you can wreak havoc in your underpants.
That particular distinction is invalid and irrelevant.
Virtual experiences are part of real life.
@JuJutsu, probably because it’d be rather difficult to do the server end stuff that pre-cu SWG did. Hell, the official SWG servers had a hard time doing the stuff that pre-cu SWG did. That being said, I think there actually were some SWG server emulators, but I’m not sure they ever got much further than being able to walk around in game. I haven’t looked in a long time though, so maybe there have been more advancements.
The process basically revolves around reverse engineering the client protocols and then emulating the server functionality. It’s complicated, and it goes into a lot of network related stuff that I’ve only got a loose handle on. But basically, you can interpret what the client sends and recieves from the offical server, and then emulate that functionality on a custom server. You still have to recode all of the server functionality though, down to the algorithms for walking and interacting with objects. It’s a lot of work, and obviously the more complicated the features handled by the server the harder it is to emulate them.
@Azaroth, as Morgan says, it is invalid as distinction. The tendency for hideous overreaction has nothing to do with the fact that it’s the internet; it’s that there’s a perceived lack of consequences. Anonymity removes any sense of responsibility while at the same time lets you more easily dehumanize the person you’re talking to into just a name and a bit of text. But the net’s not unique in what happens when you do that… the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrates that well enough.
To be clear, I had nothing to do with the people attacking the server before this event. They did this on their own initiative. When we find out about pirate servers, I usually take certain legal steps in contacting the ISP and explaining copyright and trademark violations.
Also note that in this case the servers aren’t emulators. It’s a frustrating story, but the server operators are directly stealing our work thanks to 3DO’s incompetence. (So surprising they’re bankrupt now.)
At any rate, yes, there are people that are very passionate about M59, even if they were banned for cheating previously. This passion is the main reason why Rob ‘Q’ Ellis II and I decided to buy M59 and relaunch it after 3DO had closed it down. We really wanted to preserve the game so that other people would get a chance to play a game that some people really cherish. History is important, even in MMOs.
There are two or three serious emulation projects for SWG – the one that seems to be doing the best so far is SWGemu, which aims to recreate Pre-CU SWG.
They’ve gone the legal route though, in asking that all their players have a SOE subscription and legal client software – anyone that doesn’t faces a ban.
The project has advanced a lot in the last year or so – right now the groundwork is pretty much entirely done, it’s just lacking some minor but important surface details such as getting missions to work.
Come now. We should all know by now that the Internet is SERIOUS BUSINESS.
More seriously (hah), though:
Zimbardo’s wonderful House of Horrors shows that anonymity is not at all a decisive factor. Other similar settings, like the Third Wave or (as noted above) gang warfare, are completely without any such identity shields. The most vicious of griefers also make a point of notifying you who you just got pwned by.
People take it seriously because they believe in it. And when something you believe in comes under attack, you defend it. The problem is that people choose different, and sometimes problematic, methods of defense.
Some methods of defense include setting up private servers.
Other methods involve attacking private servers.
Thanks all. Live and learn 🙂
I still think that MMO subscriptions (especially on old ass games) souldn’t be in the double digits.
Honestly, you have to -really- care about the title to pay $10/month, especially when you could be using that to play a much better game, like FFXI, Conan, (or some would say) WoW.
@ Morgan and Eolirin:
You’re oversimplifying what was a very simple comment.
Azaroth wrote:
I’m criticizing a contentious statement, even when made in jest, that fosters a trivializing attitude toward a major influence on humanity.
Behind the aliases and avatars are real people. The comment pretends that what we say and how we act when using this communications platform doesn’t matter.
“Better game” is subjective. People still play chess after hundreds of years, and text based MUDs are still very much alive. (Though I don’t know of many you still pay for.)
@Michael, eh, demonstrating that something can occur in *other* situations as well does not diminish the fact that anonymity *does* cause people to act out in ways that they normally would not. You’ll note the “in ways they normally would not” bit. It’s actually kinda key. Most of the “violent” outbursts that you see on the net would never be replicated by those people if the person they were being asses to could punch them in the face. But it’s not just the anonymity, it’s rather that the anonymity results in a lack of consequences. The griefer may tell you who you just got pwned by, but he’s not going to give you his house address, or walk up to you on the street in the real world and tell you that he’s the guy who broke into your house in UO and stole all your stuff. That could lead to “real” consequences. On the net anonymity and lack of consequences are nearly synonymous.
And people act differently in absence of consequences than they do if those consequences are there. This is easily provable. The Standford Prison Experiment showed an increase in cruelty during the periods in which the “guards” thought that the cameras were off. It’s obviously not the *only* contributor of course, but I never stated it was. The dehumanization of the prisoners and the empowering of the guards predicated a lot of the behavior, but it got worse when they also thought they weren’t being watched.
Because simply having a strong belief or investment in something isn’t enough for the sort of behaviors you see. Those things are not mutually exclusive to civility. The lack of civility we oft see on the net is very much due to the fact that there’s both a loss of identification with the person behind the words and a lack of consequences; those same people would never dream of treating their neighbors or a passerby on the street in the same way. That’s why I’m really behind Morgan on this one. Far too many people constantly lose perspective on the fact that the people behind the bit of text or graphical representation on the screen are real human beings with real emotions. This is a huge problem, and one that needs to be constantly fought against.
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