The Bigger Picture

[butzopower]

Everyone keeps putting the memory editting hacks as mere "Script Kiddies". As this may be, by definition a script kiddie is someone who knows next to nothing about anything related to actual hacking. Sure they may be young naive fools, but Sonic Team has carelessly left their game open to such assaults.

Simply put, the servers are allowing people to sell and withdraw items with numbers that don't match up. You can make a request to take out 99 items when you only have 1, and the server still puts 99 items into your inventory without double checking. This is BASIC BASIC server security being neglected.

And while it's easy to fix, undoing what's already been done isn't so easy.

I just don't see how picking up items in a mission can be confirmed, but there's no double checking these client-based requests. At the very least these should be generating errors. What the hell Sonic Team?

[Katrina]

The meseta duping has been an issue since early November. Ppl have reported the issue along with chatlogs, and step by step info on how the glitch works.

Recently, a guy on the official forums spammed the cheat in a bunch of posts, further enhancing the problem that has been known by Sega. Nothing was done early. Nothing of substance has been done since.

The economy now is all but ruined (PC/PS2). Sega's delays in addressing the issue from early reporting led us to where the economy stands today. Ruined.

As of now, they made a bad situation worse by lack of support to address the issue. Duped meseta is flooded into the economy. Rollbacks without a solution to the problem will accomplish nothing.

A day 1 rollback will cause more legits to up and leave. Keeping the character levels, but rolling back items and meseta was also mentioned. Without a permanent fix to the issues (which I don't believe is possible by Sonic Team) all this would be is a slap in the face to legits, and a minor inconvenience to the cheaters.

I saw a lot of posts prior to PSU citing how bad Sonic Team has been in the past, but shrugged it off as being over exaggeration by disgruntled fans, commonplace among many MMO's. Well, I hate to admit it and be a bandwagon jumper, but after seeing what's went on, I have to agree.

(Like a sucker, I signed up for the 6 month 'deal'. my chars have been retired for weeks, gonna keep my fingers crossed, and hope for the best, although it's not looking good. If nothing's changed, they'll stay retired for good).

[ljkkjlcm9]

I thought the bigger picture of an online game was to go online, meet people, and have fun playing a game with them and chatting, not having the best equipment and being rich. Sure it's fun to have good equipment, but that's not why I play. I play to have fun with people I either know in RL, or I met in game or through the game somehow. That's the purpose of a MMO, and people lose sight of this. They care more about their precious items, than just hanging out with other people in game.

THE JACKEL

[AeraLure]

Yes, but you can do this in most any online game, so why spend countless hours doing that as well as developing characters in an environment overridden by cheating? Removes the point of all of the grind and development, shops and earning of wealth, seeking of hard to find items, all but completely. I'd rather simply use a chat program or play and chat in an environment where the play at least actually has some meaning because the environment is better protected. I would agree with you that PSU is fun to play and the people in it are, as here on these forums, great for the most part. Many come from PSO and share that enthusiasm. I understand your point, but to me, the big picture is its an online game, not an online chat engine.

Pixie pretty much hit the nail on the head, for me anyway. I couldnt really have summed it up better so wont try. I'm on the same page. I even have the 7-month subscription. I'm also letting my characters slide more and more into semi-retirement, with a little bit of hope left for a reversal of the trend. I played 6 years of PSO though. PSU in and of itself was supposed to be the fix for all that, not itself needing fixing and patches that never seem to really come or do the job. I just dont know if I want to go through all that again.

[Katrina]

On 2006-12-20 07:55, ljkkjlcm9 wrote:
I thought the bigger picture of an online game was to go online, meet people, and have fun playing a game with them and chatting, not having the best equipment and being rich. Sure it's fun to have good equipment, but that's not why I play. I play to have fun with people I either know in RL, or I met in game or through the game somehow. That's the purpose of a MMO, and people lose sight of this. They care more about their precious items, than just hanging out with other people in game.

THE JACKEL

That's what I use AIM and YIM for , and it doesn't cost me an extra 10 bucks a month.

[ljkkjlcm9]

I don't meet people on AIM or YIM, I've met people on here, from around America, Japan, and Europe. Idk, me personally, I still enjoy the game even with all the hacking, it has far from ruined it for me. It hasn't been anything like, they walk up to you and all your stuff on you is gone, they kill everything one hit.. etc, and it's not that widespread.

THE JACKEL

[butzopower]

Hey, don't go putting words in my mouth and saying I still don't enjoy the game, as I still do, and play in open games with open people. I've stuck around with every PSO so far, even though every PSO has been ridiculously destroyed by various exploits and hacking. I'll do EXACTLY what I did in every other PSO, and that's only trade with my real life friends. Again, I've been with this since the beginning, you don't have to go spouting off the game's purpose.

My point about a bigger picture here is that everyone was just putting this off as "script kiddies" doing what script kiddies do best, and while that may be what's happening, it shows that Sonic Team can't even protect their game on the low-end of things. While you may not think that affects you, it makes me worry that bigger things have been neglected. And once that stuff is cracked, good luck going online, having fun, and meeting people while your getting FSOD'd, booted out of your own games, and having your player taken over in the lobbies.