What is hacking and what is such a big fuss about online game hacking? Here in Blueland, we have different camps of players, one supporting the notion that hacking is perfectly harmless and the other maintaining that hacking is illegal and hackers should be dealt with severely. The rights and wrongs about game hacking remain highly questionable, with our forum participants debating against each other over this issue since Luna Online existed on cyberspace.
Think about the old game hacking chestnut that involved editing a high score file on your PC to make your Tetris score seemingly untouchable. There’s nothing illegal about that. The question is where to draw the legal line when it comes to manipulating things on your own PC. If parts of a massively distributed online game reside on a PC, can you change them? What’s at stake is virtual property – and lots of money. The whole notion of virtual property rights in online games is a tricky one. Games such as Luna Online have their own virtual economies that involve licensing and developing virtual property. Middle market companies like SEAGM are known to convert virtual wealth into hard currency.
In addition, it is possible to cheat by manipulating the parts of a massively distributed online game that exist on your own PC. That is, the game client program on a gamer’s PC interacts with the central game servers over the Internet, and cheating can be accomplished without any network security shenanigans by focusing attacks on the client software. By attaching a debugger to the game program on the PC, or by manipulating the game program by poking memory values directly on the PC, a gamer can hack… on his or her own PC.
The problem is that it’s possible to convert hacking skills into money by conjuring up virtual items in a game, either by exploiting a bug or by creating and using a bot. These exploits can then be sold in a burgeoning online market; in our case the town at Alker Harbor. Malicious players have flocked to our game domain because they know there is money to be made.
The Gryffindor Guild started off with a no-hack policy enforced on its members and such policy have been maintained till today. Although our Guild leaders may not have the privilege to determine whether our members are “hack” free, any Guild member found to be using illegally applied game programmes will be dealt with immediately. Small offenders are let off with stern warnings not to hack again and more serious offenders are usually expelled from the Guild after due consideration.
We do not dislike hackers but we dislike hacking and activities related to hacking.
If you see any Gryffindor members using hack skills while training, please let us know. PM “Evander” in Blueland or send him an email “evander.luna(a)gmail.com”. All reports and complaints shall be treated with strict confidentiality and will be investigated by our Guild leaders.
