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Rockstar rolls back the 'Red Dead Online' update that broke everything
The glitches were funny, but surely frustrating for dedicated players.
Elite: Dangerous rolls back decision on billionaire rollback
There was a bit of a to-do recently about money in Elite: Dangerous. A bug caused numerous players to receive a credit "refund" that wound up making them instant billionaires, which might have had some long-term ramifications for anyone who had hoped to actually play in the sandbox economy in the future. While the developers had initially opted against wide-scale rollbacks, asking instead for affected players to choose whether to be rolled back or not, that decision has been reversed. Unexpected billionaires will find all of their bug-gotten gains rolled back and removed, with the development team contacting those affected personally to make sure that nothing legitimate gets caught in the crossfire. Meanwhile, players who found a way to exploit the game explicitly will also see their gains removed. So those who were hoping for rollbacks in the wake of these issues will be happy; those happy with billions of credits for no real effort will be... less happy. [Thanks to Cotic for the tip!]
The Think Tank: On MMO rollbacks
Let's talk about rollbacks. ArcheAge, Elite: Dangerous, Neverwinter -- whenever an MMO pops up in the news with a bug, there's usually an accompanying cry for a rollback, and each of these games has seen such in the last few months. Rollbacks used to be quite common, but modern MMO companies almost never risk them. For today's Think Tank, I asked the Massively writers whether they'd ever suffered rollbacks, whether they'd lost anything, whether it was worth it, and just what they think of the whole issue.
Economy exploits plague ArcheAge [Updated]
If you were hoping that this would be the week in which there were no stories of ArcheAge bugs or exploits hitting the news, we're sorry to say that reality has dashed your hopes. Players are reporting numerous exploits hitting the game, some of which have been publicly detailed on the game's subreddit, such as a method to force the game to offer specific loot when random boxes are opened. The exploits are being investigated and will be rolled back illegal character gains will be reversed if discovered, according to Trion Worlds. Further posts clarify that players who were unknowingly involved in these exploits (through the Marketplace or simple dumb luck) will not be targeted, although players are advised to use caution in their dealings and avoid obviously suspicious deals. [Thanks to squidgod2000 and Thunder for the tips! Our original story conflated the words rollback and reversal. Trion Worlds has told us that server rollbacks are not on the table. The studio says it will reverse characters found to have knowingly benefited from the exploit. The marketplace has been taken offline while the exploit investigation continues.]
Star Trek Online restores players flagged for exploits
Star Trek Online recently launched a new expansion with a level cap bump, and unfortunately some people decided to quickly exploit the mechanics to race up to the renewed level cap via exploits. Unfortunate, but not totally surprising. Cryptic Studios, needless to say, rolled back the gains made by those players. Unfortunately, as can happen, a few innocent players were caught in the crossfire, but what can you do about that? Well, in this case you can re-examine players who were erroneously rolled back and restore their points. Producer Stephen D'Angelo made a post on the official forums stating that instead of trying to make another adjustment, all players will have the points that were removed restored to them. So it's back to how things were before, and if you lost out on points through no real fault of your own, you have them back. Or even if it was through direct fault of your own. [Thanks to Some_Guy for the tip!]
RIFT performs extensive rollback following hardware outage
Denizens of one of RIFT's more populated servers are experiencing the raw end of a 23-hour rollback following hardware issues. Trion Worlds Executive Producer Bill Fisher announced that a hardware outage hit three servers early this morning, with one of them -- Faeblight -- lacking a recent data save point and requiring a one-day rollback. "This is a significant loss for players on this shard and we fully understand that," Fisher said. "We are currently in the process of identifying and refunding RIFT Store purchases for users from Faeblight, as well as tracking down any Instant Sixty potions that were granted on this shard. This process may take several hours but we will ensure that any credits spent during this time are returned." Fisher said that the studio is giving bonuses to the affected servers and is contemplating more compensation. Trion also implemented a hotfix that is giving a false error to players, stating that the update requires a full re-download. The actual patch is much smaller than that.
Darkfall rolls back Stamina changes after player protests
The development team behind Darkfall had a couple of issues. The first issue was that no one was using Primalist armor. The second was that stamina regeneration was disabled during sprinting. So it seemed like an obvious combination. Give Primalist robes the ability to boost stamina regeneration, let other armor types see stamina drop a bit faster, and everyone would have a bit more motivation to use robes. Elegant, no? As it turned out, the resultant regeneration and overall issues led to an immediate rollback and a 40% decrease in stamina consumption across the board, meaning that these issues are all back to the drawing board. An apology was issued for the unintended consequences of the patch, with the team promising to examine the issue in more depth whilst looking for a solution that doesn't lead to this level of fan outcry. [Thanks to Dengar for the tip!]
Neverwinter exploit results in emergency maintenance, no rollback
Neverwinter's emergency maintenance this afternoon fueled speculation among players that another currency exploit was to blame and a rollback was imminent, but Perfect World Community Manager Akromatik says no rollback is planned. On the official forums, he wrote, Due to an exploit we had to bring down the servers for an emergency maintenance. The exploit was brought to our attention by our fantastic community. Your efforts, enabled us to find and implement a fix as soon as possible. Unfortunately the fix required downtime and will likely require additional maintenance following our investigation. While there is no rollback planned, we will be taking action against people who abused this exploit. Thank you for your patience, diligence and understanding. We will keep you updated as the situation develops. A serious currency exploit in May of 2013 after the game had soft-launched into "open beta" did in fact result in a rollback. [Thanks to Jeremiah for the tip!]
Darkfall market exploit leads to rollback
The bad news: Unscrupulous players found and abused an exploit of Darkfall's market this past week. The worse news: Because of this, Aventurine had to roll back inventories to last Thursday, May 22nd. "With the help of the community we have discovered that there was some exploiting of our market feature at the end of last week," Aventurine posted on Facebook today. "We immediately deactivated the market to fix this issue and we identified those who had been actively exploiting it. We are in the process of permanently banning these players for their actions, as their behavior is inconsistent with the values we've set for the Darkfall Unholy Wars community." The silver lining to all of this, apart from a hopefully fixed exploit, is that the studio is granting three days of additional game time to all accounts on June 1st.
BlackBerry urges BB10 users to roll-back its glitchy Twitter app
After loads of BB10 user complaints, BlackBerry is pulling the latest Twitter update from its app market. Should you still need your 140-character fix however, the beleaguered smartphone maker has a solution: roll back to the application's previous version -- 10.2.1 -- via the simple step-by-step instructions posted on its blog. First, delete Twitter from your device. Then, open BlackBerry World, refresh it and search for the micro-blogging service by name. Voila, a (hopefully) stable app should appear. If anything, this proves that the QWERTY king listens to more than just those in its boardroom. So, the next time that you notice an app go wonky, speak up -- it likely won't be in vain.
The Daily Grind: When are rollbacks and wipes absolutely necessary?
In the last few weeks, two big games we cover on Massively have been slammed with exploits that have injured their respective economies: Diablo III and Neverwinter. In Diablo III's case, a gold duping bug apparently pumped insane amounts of cash into the economy. Neverwinter's exploits run the gamut from Foundry abuses to negative auction hall bids that don't consume gold to classes that can one-shot bosses making farming trivial. According to these claims, NW exploiters are making off with thousands of real-life dollars when cashing out their ill-gotten funds. In both cases, players called for characters wipes and rollbacks, believing each exploit severe enough to merit a clean slate. But in Diablo III's case, while the studio dealt harshly with the exploiters, the developers disagreed with the need for wipes and do-overs, presumably having concluded that such drastic measures would impact the legit playerbase far more than would a dented economy. Neverwinter, on the other hand, chose to roll back the servers, causing widespread uproar. That brings us to today's question: Which studio was right? How bad does an exploit have to be before character wipes and server rollbacks are absolutely necessary? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Neverwinter returns with seven-hour rollback after exploit
Over the weekend, a massive exploit plagued Perfect World Entertainment's Neverwinter beta as players discovered a way to make billions off of the auction house and Astral Diamond Exchange. After initially closing the economy to explore the company's options, PWE decided to do a seven-hour rollback of the servers that affects the progress made between 8:20 a.m. EDT (5:20 a.m. PDT) and 3:20 p.m. EDT (12:20 p.m. PDT) yesterday for all players. "Rest assured, the issue has been corrected and we have taken appropriate action against all players who took advantage of the bug, including but not limited to enforcing permanent bans," the announcement reads. [Thanks to everyone who sent this one in!]
Ultima Online levies two-week rollback for high-pop server
It's not a good time to be a player on Ultima Online's Atlantic server, to put it lightly. Mythic was forced to rollback the game (and players' progress) yesterday on Atlantic to a backup from two weeks ago. Atlantic is the highest-populated shard in the Western hemisphere. The official announcement cut straight to the point: "Due to issues beyond our control, I am sorry to have to inform all of Atlantic that we had to revert to a Dec 5th backup. We have tried to retrieve a more current backup but we have been unable to do so due to corruption issues." Mythic said that it will be compensating affected players with a month of free game time, although that's undoubtedly small consolation to those who have lost progress and acquisitions during this period. Apart from the short announcement, there has been no additional communication from the studio on the issue. [Thanks to Brad for the tip!]
Guild Wars 2 players suffer a server outage
Guild Wars 2 players were distressed last night to find themselves kicked from the game during loading screens and unable to log in. Shortly after the problems began, ArenaNet's community team started communicating about them via Twitter, saying that the issues were being looked into. Forum logins were also disabled. After about an hour of downtime, the game was once again accessible to all -- with a slight problem. Many players discovered that they'd lost the fruits of recent endeavors, including map exploration, items, experience, and gold. According to the Guild Wars 2 Twitter, the team is unable to restore progression or items due to the nature of the outage. Beyond updates as the issue was being resolved, no one from ArenaNet has given comment about the nature of the outage or how such problems will be avoided in the future.
Blizzard denies Diablo III authenticator hacking claims
We've been following the mass reports of hackers bypassing passwords and authenticators to rob Diablo III accounts blind, and now we have a new twist on the story. While Blizzard confirmed "an increase in reports of individual account compromises," the studio says it has no hard evidence that hackers have found a way to skirt around the authentication system. Community Manager Bashiok said that the company is taking the claims "extremely seriously" and is investigating the rash of account compromises. "Despite the claims and theories being made, we have yet to find any situations in which a person's account was not compromised through traditional means of someone else logging into their account through the use of their password," he said. "While the authenticator isn't a 100% guarantee of account security, we have yet to investigate a compromise report in which an authenticator was attached beforehand." Blizzard is assisting compromised customers by restoring stolen items and rolling back their accounts. The studio has a post up on its forums to help players protect their accounts and get assistance if theft occurs.
Turbine upgrades LotRO's compromised account reimbursement policy
Account security is a worrysome topic in Lord of the Rings Online these days, especially following a reported rise in hacks and thefts among the playerbase. A couple months ago Codemasters implemented a stronger policy to help players recover lost property, a direction that Turbine followed yesterday when it revised its compromised account reimbursement policy. Sapience announced on the LotRO forums that this policy is significantly updated and expanded from the old one. Now when a player's account is hacked, Turbine gives a seven-day window to report the issue, during which the company can restore "most" of the lost items and compensate players for items that cannot be replaced. This, however, is not a true rollback and does not cover accounts compromised before February 24th. Turbine also reassured players that the studio is making it much tougher for unauthorized intruders to delete or sell rare items like raid gear, which should add another layer of protection from losing one's goods.
MapleStory Europe's economy collapses due to currency exploit [Updated]
Despite its huge financial success, MapleStory Europe has had more than its fair share of problems. Last month, controversy hit MapleStory Europe when double-xp cards lasting for 90 days, instead of the intended 24 hours, were accidentally placed in the cash shop during the new year sale. The latest issue to hit MapleStory Europe has done serious and potentially irrecoverable damage to the game's economy. The exploit involved the Chief Bandit and Shadower classes, which both have a skill called "Meso Guard". This causes them to lose mesos, the game's currency, when hit instead of hitpoints. Packet-forging exploits have been used for some time to alter the damage players deal to monsters or receive from them. Combined with Meso Guard, hackers were able to fool the game into hitting them for -2,147,483,648 damage (the largest negative value a signed 32-bit integer can hold). Since the damage was a negative value, the Meso Guard skill then granted the player over two billion mesos. Hacking players used their ill-gotten gains to buy up practically everything in players' market stalls, massively inflating the game's economy by pouring untold billions into the hands of random players. Nexon attempted to patch the exploit last night and responded by permanently trade-banning countless accounts. Reports from players indicate that the exploit is still possible and that many of the offending accounts were not banned. To make matters worse, a large number of legitimate players who were traded ill-gotten currency were also allegedly trade-banned. The follow-up to another meso exploit found last year was similarly lackluster, with no server rollback performed in either instance. [Update: Scott Yoo from Nexon Europe got in touch with us to provide an update on the story. He had the following to say: "[W]e did 'trade-ban' suspected accounts temporarily in order to conduct an internal investigation but we also had to make sure no-more illicitly gained Mesos (in-game currency) are going out to the in-game market and contained in the meanwhile. We do admit that a certain amount of legitimate players can be included in the trade banned list and that's what we are going to reveal through the investigation carefully. [...] The reason why we didn't perform a rollback on our servers was because we detected the exploit too late which may make the players lose even more of their gains if we were to turn everything back. Another announcement that includes more details on this incident will go up live shortly (either today or tomorrow as the latest)."]
Dell Streak's pre-rooted Android 2.1 update quietly suspended, revision coming in two or three weeks
Ruh roh. Looks like Dell's stepped onto its own toes real hard with the Streak's Android 2.1 update -- O2 just confirmed to us that due to some "feedback from users," it's decided to suspend said download while Dell gets cranking on a revised software release over the next two or three weeks. We weren't given the exact reasons behind this quiet withdrawal, but our friends over at MoDaCo might have had the answer for some time -- soon after the release, they discovered that the 2.1 firmware was in fact pre-rooted, thus leaving the Streak vulnerable to unauthorized access and modification (although handy for the seriously tech-minded). Yikes. On the bright side, such substantial time frame suggests that the upcoming fix should also address other bugs like incompatibility with the desktop suite, weird loading behavior in the browser, and missing WMV video playback functionality. And here comes the inevitable question: what about Froyo? Well, neither Dell nor O2 could provide a date for the Streak's scoop of frozen dessert, but we'll bet you a white iPhone 4 that it won't be out in October.
The Daily Grind: Which patch would you like to see rolled back?
Usually, patches are nothing less than a reason to put on a gaudy party hat and boogie on down in celebration. After all, it's almost always good news, right? Bugs are squashed! Issues resolved! Features added! Content enriched! Classes balanced! Yet sometimes, a patch arrives that leaves a sour taste in one's mouth, as it does more damage than good -- it significantly weakens a class, it introduces a host of new bugs, it shifts the gameplay focus to an undesired area, or it trivializes past achievements. So, assuming that you were granted the divine power to roll back one patch in one MMO -- a patch, mind you, not an expansion -- which would it be? Which patch still grates on your nerves to this very day, a patch so bad that you consider it an abomination to gaming everywhere? What one update to your MMO would have been better never being born in the first place? Speak your mind, or forever hold your peace!
Wal-mart rolls back cheap Blu-ray player price to $98
Like Blu-ray but hate spending lots of money? The guys at FormatWarCentral spotted the Magnavox NB530MGX Blu-ray player cold lampin' on the shelf of a local Wal-mart now permanently rolled back from $168 to a mere $98. as usual, you'll pass up the newest, fastest, internet-connected-est features of high end Blu-ray players, but for less than a hundred it's hard to complain. We know many probably missed out on the Meijer deal last month, anyone planning on picking this one up for a second -- or first -- Blu-ray player? We'll see how long Sony avoids the "battle to the bottom" now.
