From Pantheon and Corepunk to Quinfall and Ashes of Creation, indie MMORPGs have been having kind of a duping moment lately. For the innocent among you, duping is basically a cheat where you duplicate items, usually valuable items or piles of money or gear, generally for profit. How dupes occur is really depending on the particulars of the MMORPG. The first time I ever heard of duping, it was in Ultima Online approximately a thousand years ago, when people figured out some stupid trick with dragging piles of gold into chessboards across a server line or something ridiculous like that. Obviously, modern MMORPGs aren’t going to tell us how it’s being done – just crack down on it, ideally, when it catches people trying to destroy the economy. And those dupes most definitely hurt the game when the money spigot became a crushing flood, though it’s not technically why I left.
Has widespread duping and the concomitant busted economy or cheat-culture in a game ever ruined an MMO for you?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
