Motherboard has a fun-slash-depressing piece out this week on an unnamed hacker who claims he’s been cheating at MMORPGs to make a living for almost two decades.
Prior to his recent Def Con hacking conference talk, the hacker dubbed “Manfred” seemingly demoed via video a hack performed in WildStar, one he used to help him accrue nearly 400 trillion gold, which he then allegedly sold to players through various black markets. He argues he wasn’t hacking — he was providing a service by “finding unintended features in the protocol.”
At least some of his claims don’t even seem particularly outlandish, especially if you’ve been around in MMORPGs for a long time and have an understanding of how rampant duping and RMT markets have been over the last 20 years. Manfred claims he got his start in Ultima Online illegally deleting other players’ houses and selling his own on Ebay, funding his days in college. Since then, Motherboard says, he cheated and duped his way through the “wild west” of Lineage 2, Shadowbane, Final Fantasy XI, Dark Age of Camelot, Lord of The Rings Online, RIFT, Age of Conan, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Guild Wars 2.
He doesn’t participate in the underground cheater industry anymore, he claims, having gone legit. While he says it’s because he “wasn’t comfortable doing what [he] was doing,” it’s also at least partly a result of the changing business model for online games.
“Now that many companies make money using in-game purchases, he doesn’t think it’s fair to compete with their economic strategies,” Motherboard writes. And it’s true: The studios found one small way to deal with cheaters. But everyone else? Yeah, we still pay the same, just to a different source.
