ArenaNet Punishes Hacker in Style

The purpose of DRM, ostensibly, is twofold: prevent people from pirating a game, and similarly to keep people from hacking it. While there has been a lot of issues raised with DRM (and rightfully so) sometimes a developer does it right. Like, say, with Game Dev Tycoon making all pirated copies of the game suffer a unique issue where a player’s dev team is put out of business due to over-piracy. Delicious irony, you know? Especially when it could be mistaken for a bug and you can get Pirates to inadvertently admit to having pirated the game when they go to forums or reddit to complain.

Now.

Due to their always-online, always-multiplayer nature, it should go without saying that MMO’s have some of the strictest “DRM” in the business, in that it’s constantly being monitored for cheats and thieves; hence why one of the hallmarks of a good MMO is that it’ll have its own client. Usually, however, an MMO’s form of DRM is pretty straightforward: account and ISP bans. But what happens when you combine ‘funny’ DRM with an MMO?

The past few weeks, a player has been going around the World v World v World server in Guild Wars 2 and using hacks, cheats, and a whole lot of illegal stuff to basically turn hundreds of other players into his playthings. His character was invincible, did tremendous amounts of damage, could teleport, and made the game not very fun for everyone in the process. This was finally put to a close, however, after the capture of their identity via a video demonstrating this player’s cheating ways.  Arenanet, the studio behind Guild Wars 2, leapt into action upon seeing it, and posted a response on the forum:

“We don’t need to see it in-game, sometimes good video evidence is enough for me to track down who it was. In this case, the video was enough for me to find out who it was and take action. Thanks for the video, and to accompany your video, I give you this video of his account’s last moments.”

This was the video posted with that message:



A public shaming of the hacker by stripping his character down, forcing him to jump off a cliff to his death, followed by the deletion of his characters and the banning of his account. Justice has been served, with style, and the players of WvWvW can rest easy… at least, until the hacker makes a new account and tries again. The hacks are still there, presumably, so while this may have been validating it was also, honestly, just a band-aid over a gaping wound.

In fact, the hacker might yet wind up on top. Riot Games, the developer behind League of Legend, has gone on record saying that it will pay hackers to help find the weaknesses in their code. I can imagine, despite this video, the hacker and Arenanet might come to an ‘understanding’ themselves, an understanding that would earn the hacker a pretty penny in the process. That’s all conjecture, but the point remains.

While it’s kind of cool, and certainly different enough to warrant pointing out… it’s kind of shallow.