It is unfor­tu­nate for my first post about the game I’m cur­rently spend­ing exces­sive amount of play­ing to be of this kind.  Phan­tasy Star Online 2, the newest addi­tion to the ven­er­a­ble J-RPG fran­chise has recently (and pre­ma­turely, in may ways) ended its open beta and went live.  I started play­ing it towards end of open beta, and I wasn’t impressed to see Game­Guard is deployed in this game.  It’s a pub­lic knowl­edge that games use crappy third-party solu­tions like Game­Guard and Hack­Shield have lit­tle to no built-in pro­tec­tion will be hacked mer­ci­lessly by those who can bypass the add-on software.

Accord­ing to Sega’s offi­cial post, this hack­ing inci­dent seemed to have orig­i­nated in Ship 02, the server I am in.  The hack­ers found a way to relo­cate NPC to coor­di­nates that is inac­ces­si­ble to ordi­nary play­ers.  A tem­po­rary server restart reset NPC loca­tions, but nonethe­less did not patch the hack.  Finally, a 5-hour main­te­nance is under­go­ing at this moment which hope­fully will fix the issue.

Mov­ing NPC is a rather tame way of hack­ing MMO; I’d rather deal­ing with this, than things such as dup­ing and other more mali­cious forms of screw­ing other peo­ple over.  Nonethe­less, this inci­dent has its uncom­fort­ably close rela­tion­ship to the Eng­lish speak­ing PSO2 com­mu­nity.  Ship 02, block 20~25 are the unof­fi­cial blocks of Eng­lish speak­ing play­ers, in which my guild (or “Team” in PSO2 term) and myself iden­tify with.  Words of mouths and var­i­ous sources showed that the hacker is among us.

Thanks to the game’s auto-saving chat log, the fol­low­ing con­ver­sa­tion found its way to a cer­tain Japan­ese BBS.  (source The quote is removed, details in com­ments.)

16 名前：名無しオンライン[sage] 投稿日：2012/07/12(木) 10:13:56.79 ID:NC3WCYo8 [1/17]
367 名前：名無しオンライン[sage] 投稿日：2012/07/12(木) 05:52:58.75 ID:0cLVsolu
2012–07-12T05:09:18 83 PUBLIC 10140110 Zap­ero force sega to patch
2012–07-12T05:09:26 85 PUBLIC 10140110 Zap­ero they didnt care when we moved peo­ple
2012–07-12T05:09:30 86 PUBLIC 10140110 Zap­ero now they have to care
2012–07-12T05:09:36 87 PUBLIC 10067252 Szi­adan we’ve been at it since closed beta, sega haven’t done any­thing to stop it yet
2012–07-12T05:09:53 88 PUBLIC 10067252 Szi­adan /la sit2
2012–07-12T05:10:05 90 PUBLIC 10197844 Vahl­yse we should invade blocks 1–5 one day dur­ing peak jp times. and let them know how pissed we are
2012–07-12T05:10:07 91 PUBLIC 10140110 Zap­ero we dont do any­thing to harm you
2012–07-12T05:10:11 92 PUBLIC 10197844 Vahl­yse that servers wont be global…
2012–07-12T05:14:18 105 PUBLIC 10067252 Szi­adan we’ve been mov­ing peo­ple behind the win­dow for quite some time now, sega did noth­ing about it
2012–07-12T05:15:21 112 PUBLIC 10197844 Vahl­yse yeah well they need to learn a les­son in busiess
2012–07-12T05:15:52 113 PUBLIC 10197844 Vahl­yse not tell peo­ple to not play the game
2012–07-12T05:15:59 114 PUBLIC 10197844 Vahl­yse thats just bad prat­ice…
2012–07-12T05:18:48 119 PUBLIC 10197844 Vahl­yse a strat­egy would involve them actu­ally car­ing about get­ting money from us
2012–07-12T05:18:54 121 PUBLIC 10197844 Vahl­yse in fact its not a stat­egy at all
2012–07-12T05:19:39 124 PUBLIC 10197844 Vahl­yse no i never said they need to learn a les­son i said other busi­nesses dont do @#!@ like that
2012–07-12T05:19:53 130 PUBLIC 10197844 Vahl­yse how would nike ever got­ten any­where if its adver­tise­ment said

何か犯人とその取り巻き？のチャットログあったんで抜き出してみた

The quote should not be fake, but mis­lead­ing.  It reads like Zap­ero, Szi­adan and Vahl­yse were the dis­grun­tled hack­ers who tried to stage some kind of inva­sion against Japan­ese play­ers.  A more com­plete chat log was posted on a pso-world thread by Vahl­yse, claim­ing the com­ments were made by her fiance who was play­ing with her char­ac­ter, and the com­ments are unre­lated to Zap­ero and Szi­adan, who sup­pos­edly are the real hackers.

Any­way, that seem to be a drama for another day and another place.  Tl;dr would be: two hack­ers decided to troll every­body in respond­ing how Sega has not patched the hack that existed back in beta.  It can be worse, much worse–imagine they mass dupe money (if that is pos­si­ble) to get Sega’s atten­tion.  Offi­cial reports that Sega has banned 75 accounts for RMT and using third-party pro­grams since open beta.  I wish they real­ize that ban­ning cheaters doesn’t fix the dam­age that has already been inflicted to the game… and I heard from PSO/PSU play­ers of Sega is not very good at doing that.

With this shit hit the fan, the back­slash will be def­i­nite.  Some Japan­ese play­ers already dis­like see­ing for­eign­ers run­ning around in what they con­sider “their game”, and it would be fun to find out how they think of us after this inci­dent.  It is also remotely pos­si­ble for Sega to region IP block the game…  I know I will cer­tainly not be happy with that.  Not with a game that I paid for pre­mium service.

On the other hand, I also paid for Mabinogi; paid a lot con­sider how much time I’ve been play­ing.  I guess this isn’t my first time I will­ingly spend money on a “unclean” cause.

PS: oh wait, the main­te­nance ended early!  Screw proof read­ing I’m hit­ting the Pub­lish button.