Belated Happy-Birthday Dungeon overlord.
I remember the time when a unorganized hacking almost emptied the game servers of a game i was playing.
It was 2008-2009 i was playing a Korean MMO called RF(Rising Force) Online. It was probably one of the most amazing mmo's ive ever played. 3 factions with special faction abilities, scheduled battles (3 times a day) and a mining based economy.
Now the scheduled battles are fought over the mining area. Each faction charge in to capture control points, whomever wins gets mining rights for 8 hours and mining rights meant cheaper everything. Those battles gave me the most thrilling MMO's pvp i ever experienced.
The problem started when the game went f2p, now it was probably the best and the worst thing that happened to the game, it got fanfare and became really popular, but. BUT! the hackers/dupers/cheaters came flooding in. At first it was just a minor annoyance people running around with a duped +7 weapon, some guy in an area stuck in a wall firing a rocket launcher with the damage cranked to a bazillion via cheat engine.
Then they came to the chip wars. For some reason the majority of the cheaters seemed to come from one faction only. They set up in choke points and murder everyone with a red life bar. Needless to say they win the battles everytime, and the two other factions struggled with their economy. Especially my faction, cause our racial quirk was big awesome mechs. They were not cheap to buy or repair, but they were out trump card every battle. But they went down with one shot due to the cheaters. And most of the mech pilots called it quits and stopped playing and almost everyone followed suit. It was the same for the other factions, even the one that had the most cheaters. It went so bad there were times that less than 30 people were playing at any given time and were probably doing an in game BDSM session with the hackers. The company had to shutdown the servers for 2 weeks just to implement an anti cheating 3rd party software. But the damaged had already been done and the number of players never came back to what it was and a couple of years later the servers were finally closed. Everyone i know who played the game explains their experience like they were vietnam veterans, me included.
