My take on the duping bug

[Barubary6]

Everyone is mad at Sonic Team for making such a stupid bug in a production online game. I'm just writing here to make sure that the correct portion of Sonic Team is blamed.

Blame the QA department of Sonic Team. Please don't blame the developers.

Software developers have an annoyingly difficult job, trying to get hundreds of thousands of miniature programs to work together to produce a big result. The Gamecube PSO's EXE file is about 3 megabytes. Mario 1's code was about 20 kilobytes. PSO is 154 times more complicated than Mario 1. Getting every single chunk of code exactly right is downright impossible, no matter how good the programmers.

It's not the job of the programmers to find every bug. If they did that, they'd be spending more time playing the game than making the game. It's the job of the Quality Assurance department to find all the things wrong in the game. The developers have a responsibility to make their code as bug-free as possible the first time, but that *isn't* possible.

I will place the blame on the developers for a huge factor here, however. It is the developer's fault that this bug is forcing them to recall the game, rather than being silently fixed like in most other online games. The reason why is somewhat technical.

After Version 1 was thoroughly destroyed by cheating, Sonic Team decided to make changes. One of the major problems in Version 1 was that they had absolutely no way to fix client-side bugs in the game. This they solved quite simply by adding a mechanism to patch the client when the client logs onto the server. This is, quite naturally, called RcvProgramPatch by Sonic Team.

The problem with RcvProgramPatch is that it is a temporary patch. As soon as you turn off your system (or exit the game in the case of PC PSO), the patches to are gone. A fresh, buggy copy of PSO is loaded the next time you boot it. With only RcvProgramPatch, you can't fix offline bugs, except for the case where the client goes online then plays offline without rebooting.

The solution to this is pretty easy. They should have set aside some memory in the memory card files for patch data. Under this system, when RcvProgramPatch sends a new patch set for the client, it would write the patch to memory card. If the client ever sees a save file with the patch in it, it would run the patch.

With such a system, this bug would be basically meaningless, and be fixed quietly. Any character that has been online will be marked in such a way that loading it causes the bug to be fixed. This would limit cheaters to using the bug to copy items which were earned entirely offline. Considering that many items can only be found online, this severely limits the cheaters' options, and in general makes things painful. Once they go online with a character, they can't use that character to dupe anymore. Building up a character offline to a point at which even materials start appearing takes a ridiculous amount of time. Who's going to play the game for 5 hours just to dupe 30 materials?

(modified nearly immediately to change the word "online" to "offline" in one place; it was obvious I meant offline)

-- Barubary

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Barubary6 on 2002-09-23 00:14 ]</font>

EDIT: Don't even hint about how to cheat - watch yourself, Barubary.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: rbf2000 on 2002-09-23 01:04 ]</font>

[Spy]

Really, why do you strive so hard to make yourself look superior to Sonic Team? Are you really so deprived of attention that you need to write lengthy posts trashing Sonic Team by pointing out their every error and publishing codes to ruin their games?

[rbf2000]

I don't know where to place the blame over there at ST, I just know that as soon as I heard of offline multiplayer, I heard people talking about ways to exploit this for duping. I would have thought that they would have made it a point to prevent duping from playing offline multiplayer.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: rbf2000 on 2002-09-23 01:15 ]</font>

[MORB]

Actually, what makes that kind of bugs easy to fix in other games is that the characters are saved server-side.
Hence, the devs can parse the logs to find out the dupped items, and do one or more of the following: delete the duped items, ban or warn the player if evidences were found of deliberate exploitation of the bug, delete the character, etc.
Also, since the inventory and every data related to the character is managed by the servers, finding a way to make an old version of the client work with the current servers is of no help to reproduce exploits - once it's patched on the servers, you can't use the cheat anymore.

Of course, all of this means either no offline mode, or different characters for offline and online modes. But then you have close to 0 cheaters - only people that exploits bugs which are always fixed.

The question is, would have the PSO players be willing to not have offline playing mode ?

[Spy]

On 2002-09-23 04:55, MORB wrote:

The question is, would have the PSO players be willing to not have offline playing mode ?


To me having no offline mode is unacceptable.

[Wewt]

Cancelling out offline mode will lose many customers, but server side saving will help all of those that play online. It has its good and bad sides, but in the end, in the 3rd attempt, Sonic Team have decided to keep offline mode and expand upon it. So it will always be easier to cheat.

[KodiaX987]

Don't blame the PSO makers for a bug in their program. Blame the fuckheads who exploit it for their own ends.

Simple as that.

[Wewt]

Er, no. It's true you should blame the cheaters for doing the cheating, but it's the game developers' responsibility to make sure the game is "safe".

[KodiaX987]

No burglars in the town, no policemen needed. Unfortunately, since we live in Hell, we are forced to react against single-braincell idiots who most likely will never understand that not all things on the web are free from illegality.

[Wewt]

That's just it, we're already in that hell. It's too bad though, after what had happened on Dreamcast PSO, you'd think people would learn their lessons.

[KodiaX987]

I'll have to re-preach my version of the meaning of life: wage war against the lamers! http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_lol.gif

-Insult a lamer: 1 point.
-Hurt a lamer: 10 points.
-Kill a lamer: 100 points.

And thus is the origin of good karma! http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif

[MORB]

Well, alas it quite doesn't work like that.
You always have morons. Whatever the game, if there's a way to cheat or to exploit, there's people who make use of it.

If the characters datas are stored client-side, you'll always have people figuring out ways of cheating (be it by exploiting bugs in off-line game, by making offline cheats, or by editing the game save with an hex editor)

In the same way, if you use an insecure networking architecture (barubary will correct me in his typical arrogant way if I'm wrong, but DC PSO was relying a lot on direct communications between clients), you'll have people exploiting it to cheat online (here i'm speaking of the most evil and stupid ones like noling, mass-teleporting people from lobby to pioneer 2, etc.).

That second category of cheats can be avoided without removing offline play (I hope they have a real centralized client-server architecture this time), but as long as you can use offline characters in online games, you'll have duper and forged items. Always.
They really shouldn't take the trouble of exchanging the bugged GC PSOs in japan, since the gameshark punks will have item codes up and running shortly anyway...

Basically, if you want offline game, you have to deal with cheaters. It's a bundle.

Ps: Hehe KodiaX, Soeur Marie-Therese des Batignolles rules ;)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: MORB on 2002-09-23 12:04 ]</font>

[Barubary6]

On 2002-09-23 01:14, rbf2000 wrote:
I don't know where to place the blame over there at ST, I just know that as soon as I heard of offline multiplayer, I heard people talking about ways to exploit this for duping. I would have thought that they would have made it a point to prevent duping from playing offline multiplayer.


You deleted my answer to this when you edited my message.

Sonic Team *did* try to make sure that offline multiplayer couldn't be used for duping. It is actually because of this that the duping bug works! Sonic Team made it so that the game doesn't save if you're ever in offline multiplayer mode to prevent any possible bugs from allowing duping, but they didn't check to make sure that there was no *other* way to save the game. The result is that one player saves and the other doesn't.

You seem to want an answer to the question, but reject the truthful answer itself as cheating information...

-- Barubary

[KodiaX987]

On 2002-09-23 13:24, Barubary6 wrote:
truthful

Whoop! Rule number one of PSOW: Never, EVER say the T-word in the Cheaters forum. http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_razz.gif

[RagMasterRappy]

On 2002-09-23 00:22, Spy wrote:
Really, why do you strive so hard to make yourself look superior to Sonic Team? Are you really so deprived of attention that you need to write lengthy posts trashing Sonic Team by pointing out their every error and publishing codes to ruin their games?


You shouldn't be so quick to make judgements. The person who started this thread looks as though he actually knows what he is talking about.

I agree 99% with what was said with the original post. Only 99% because I thought of the memory card idea once but decided that there's some potential problems with doing patches like that.

There's no Sonic Team trashing anywhere please re-read the entire post carefully.

[Spy]

On 2002-09-23 17:55, RagMasterRappy wrote:

There's no Sonic Team trashing anywhere please re-read the entire post carefully.



I'll re-read it if you do.

[LadyKei]

I agree 99% with what was said with the original post. Only 99% because I thought of the memory card idea once but decided that there's some potential problems with doing patches like that.



Only one real problem with it...not enuogh space on anything short of the Xbox hard drive.

Hopefully, though, they'll start doing it there, considering that thing has space to burn...you could probably dump the entire game to the drive and still have room for patches, addons, and saves.

Well, maybe not...but it's still huge, and ST would be making a great oversight if they didn't take advantage of it....after all, what else is it there for, saving a billion and one game saves on?

[Barubary6]

Hopefully, though, they'll start doing it there, considering that thing has space to burn...you could probably dump the entire game to the drive and still have room for patches, addons, and saves.

Well, maybe not...but it's still huge, and ST would be making a great oversight if they didn't take advantage of it....after all, what else is it there for, saving a billion and one game saves on?


The pirates have *definitely* figured that out. The current favorite of Xbox pirates is copying entire games to the hard drive and running directly off the hard drive.

Microsoft uses the cheapest hard drives it can find, no matter what the size is. So they end up putting disks as big as 20 gigs in an Xbox. In order to make all the consoles identical, they make the Xbox only use 8 gigs of that. But the pirates made a way to modify an Xbox to use the rest of the space to run copied games. Also, they made a way to stick 120 gig hard drives into the Xbox.

You could stick the Gamecube PSO 4 times onto the Xbox's default hard drive.

-- Barubary

[MORB]

On the DC v2, patches were indeed saved in the internal flashram. They did fix an offline exploit early (which allowed insta-kill of any enemy IIRC)

[rbf2000]

http://members.lycos.co.uk/jfabian/agreement.JPG

:x




EDIT: disabled smilies...

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: rbf2000 on 2002-09-25 19:41 ]</font>

[Wewt]

Oh lord... rbf2000, you actually read all of that?

[Barubary6]

So they can ban you for telling others how to exploit bugs in the game. I'd love for them to figure out my PSO serial number from my name posted on these message boards. Besides, I don't have the Gamecube version, so I can talk about the bugs all I want.

-- Barubary

[rbf2000]

On 2002-09-26 16:08, Barubary6 wrote:
So they can ban you for telling others how to exploit bugs in the game. I'd love for them to figure out my PSO serial number from my name posted on these message boards. Besides, I don't have the Gamecube version, so I can talk about the bugs all I want.

-- Barubary


I don't expect them to do anything at all to anybody about it. I just found it interesting that they even put that in there.

[Barubary6]

On 2002-09-26 16:08, Barubary6 wrote:
I don't expect them to do anything at all to anybody about it. I just found it interesting that they even put that in there.


Oh, I misread your tone, sorry.

-- Barubary

[THEMASTER_G1]

Sorry, but this post could cause an argument. The reason is to discuss about the issue, so please do not say anything like this again.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: RuneLateralus on 2002-10-01 20:11 ]</font>

[Dabra]

Sorry to revive this thing but i want to say my take on this thing.

If the only solution were to save patches on the memory card via that method barubary stated, then it would be a bad solution. The average cheater would know by now to delete the patch in the memory card. Or, if not accessible (sp?), he could just transfer the character data to another memory card, format the patched one and voila.

The only way would be to patch the whole file, but knowing Sonic Team as every DC PSO player know, the PSO data would be hugely patched and full of memory before you get to play 5 hours.

I say down with offline. Sure, it would lose a lot of fans but ST's reputation of making online games is rapidly decreasing (sp?), due to their lack of good patching/upgrading. And not to forget how many people gave up on PSO due to all the loopholes and cheating exploited with past phantasy star's.

Screw offline, i have yet to see an MMORPG to include offline. Why don't you talk to them and hear their take on offline inclusion, it would be there before long, if it wasn't for the cheating.

PS: Rune, why would you exclude an arguement trigger? did you mean flame?

[RuneLateralus]

Yup, it was a dumb spam and flame. I didn't want to create a personal war. Now if it was something more argumentive as in trying to do a debate, that would of been alright...but the comment he made unnecessary and personal flame. After all, all I want to do is help make this place nice and comfy!

Now, on with the discussion!

[War_Child]

Don;t flame the intelligent. It onlym akes you seem like more of an idiot.

On a serious note.. flamethrowers should be installed in all consoles. When a bug is exploited, the console melts itself so the user can't hurt anyone else with the bug. Even then they'd try to hack around this. So while a burning lump of plastic, a small explosive should detenate, splurting boiling hot plastic on stupid people.

Better yet, server-side saving.