News...

[thegreatest]

Patch and server troubles
[2003-17-11]

Hello all,

This is just a small news to assure you that we are still patching today despite yesterday's server problems. We are still investigating what the cause was, and we will keep you updated throughout the day, both on this and on patch progress

Well if you can call this any news at all..

 

[mightybunny]

instead of starting the patching yesterday???
server's where down anyway.

they could have caught 2 flies in one blow

 

[svartmetall]

I'm still curious as to what this "emergency maintenance" was in the first place.
Did the hamster's wheel get jammed?

 

[mightybunny]

hehe put that BUD beer for the hamster again.
damn cleaning lady who moved it

(love that commercial)

 

[tripitaka]

Originally posted by svartmetall
I'm still curious as to what this "emergency maintenance" was in the first place.
Did the hamster's wheel get jammed?

I believe they used the hamster from the UK's Creature comforts show.

So in the hamsters words - ' Yeah... its a bit boring' - referring to having to run in his wheel all day.

 

[old.Sandariel]

About the emergency maintenance:

I've been browsing the german boards a bit last night and it seems as if the problem (at least on the german servers) wasn't only the zones crashing...

Some smart guys found out how to exploit those crashes to duplicate items , at that point they _had_ to take the servers down, well at least the german ones. Imagine you'd have like 300 Bane's available on one server and some people running around with 3 Mithril. Well, as a german GM said, they're checking the logs and they WILL punish those who did this.
(Don't ask me how they did it, cause I won't tell you )

Well, this was not the only reason, but the duplication of items made a bad situation even worse and I don't think they had a choice. And I _guess_ they took Excalibur down at the same time, because Excal had those zone crashes, too, and before any other ppl would find out about this exploit, they'd rather take the whole server down.

No clue at all why Prydwen went down at the same time, tho.
But that's the same for some german servers, Logres i.e. never had any zonecrashes at that day and was taken down anyway.

Those servers which went down and where those uke: -people exploitet will most likely be rolled back to the time before the crashes occured OR they will try to look for those exploiters in the logs and remove the duplicated stuff manually.
No matter what they do, they will look into the logs anyway, so burn in hell Cheaters, hope you all get banned

 

[old.Emma]

they better not roll back ;p cos i gained 3 level`s yesterday in DF.

 

[old.Sandariel]

Afaik they're only considering a Rollback on those servers where people used this exploit to duplicate items.

 

[Flimgoblin]

I'd hope they'd only roll back the dupers....

cheating shites - moment I got hit by the second crash I thought: "someone will be using this to dupe something"

 

[svartmetall]

Originally posted by old.Sandariel
...burn in hell Cheaters, hope you all get banned

Amen to that.

 

[Melodic]

Am I the only one sitting here wondering at what sort of shit security systems GoA must have in place that people are able to do this?

Before the flame starts I am not a techie, but would have thought they could have made their servers secure against this sort of thing.

 

[Arkian]

Originally posted by Melodic
Am I the only one sitting here wondering at what sort of shit security systems GoA must have in place that people are able to do this?

Before the flame starts I am not a techie, but would have thought they could have made their servers secure against this sort of thing.

afaik security wasn't the issue stated here, more that some people were alegedly trying to exploit some server instability to duplicate items.

On the security note, it's nigh-on impossible to make a totally secure system.

 

[Solarius]

If it was done the way I think it was done, you're right, there was no security breach. The exploit (not gonna say how it would be possible, except that I saw it occur in reverse, ie a friend lost his items) is caused by database replication problems associated with the crashes. But then, why were we getting crashes in the first place, thats what I'd like to know!

 

[Ethild]

GOA are French company.

France lost in rugby yesterday. They are just bitter.

 

[cleeve]

The only secure system is a system that nobody can log onto and that has no possible connections to it.

Not much use as an mmo games server tbh.

Don't blame goa for this - its cheating exploiting players to blame. I suspect that Mythic will be patching the us servers shortly also if the issue is related to their code.

C

 

[gorff]

Are the servers still down now?,it says on Camelot Europe they are up but when I go to log in it says they are down.
My guess is they just haven't updated the site but checking just in case.

 

[Jalanteriel]

Let me get this straight...they stopped ALL the German servers cause there was a risk that someone or a group of people were possibly duping items in one or two of these servers (not all german servers). Then the excal server had the same problem, so they shut that too, which for some reason, did the same to Prydwen. They claim all this is due to zone crashes most likley caused by duping items?

If that is the case, why did they not shut a single French server or Camlann? What is so different about them that it would stop these exploiters from doing the same on those servers? Are they implying that the French servers are more secure/less chance of being exploited?

 

[Esoteric]

Originally posted by Jalanteriel
If that is the case, why did they not shut a single French server or Camlann? What is so different about them that it would stop these exploiters from doing the same on those servers? Are they implying that the French servers are more secure/less chance of being exploited?

Its the rugby they were drunk in a cafe supporting their national team and lost so someone with keys let them in and they sabotaged every server bar le francais.

Now they have to spend all day fixing it at work ^^.

 

[NetNifty]

Originally posted by Jalanteriel
Let me get this straight...they stopped ALL the German servers cause there was a risk that someone or a group of people were possibly duping items in one or two of these servers (not all german servers). Then the excal server had the same problem, so they shut that too, which for some reason, did the same to Prydwen. They claim all this is due to zone crashes most likley caused by duping items?

If that is the case, why did they not shut a single French server or Camlann? What is so different about them that it would stop these exploiters from doing the same on those servers? Are they implying that the French servers are more secure/less chance of being exploited?

The dupe involves using the zonecrashes and without the zonecrashes it can't be done (well afaik from what I know of it) and as the French servers and Camlann were'nt crashing there was no chance of anybody exploiting anything there. They probably took down the servers to fix them, which ofcourse they probably should have done in the first place when they started having stability problems :/

 

[delay]

Originally posted by svartmetall

Originally posted by old.Sandariel
...burn in hell Cheaters, hope you all get banned

Amen to that.

preach it, Brothers *nods*

 

[lakih]

Originally posted by old.Sandariel
No clue at all why Prydwen went down at the same time, tho.

Prydwen is running on a floppydisc in the Excalibur server. Take down excal = killing Prydwen.

 

[Telamon]

Originally posted by Arkian
afaik security wasn't the issue stated here, more that some people were alegedly trying to exploit some server instability to duplicate items.

On the security note, it's nigh-on impossible to make a totally secure system.

Duplicate stuff on crashes looks like a security issue in game terms.

 

[Telamon]

Originally posted by Solarius
If it was done the way I think it was done, you're right, there was no security breach. The exploit (not gonna say how it would be possible, except that I saw it occur in reverse, ie a friend lost his items) is caused by database replication problems associated with the crashes. But then, why were we getting crashes in the first place, thats what I'd like to know!

Database? - I'm not kidding - afaik the data is stored on spreadsheets .. are you referring to 'real' Databases, or just
'data' forming the 'data-base' of the game?

<- Really interested in that one

 

[Driwen]

Originally posted by Telamon
Duplicate stuff on crashes looks like a security issue in game terms.

its a security problem in the game code though, nothing goa can really do something about as mythic writes the code.

 

[Telamon]

Originally posted by Driwen
its a security problem in the game code though, nothing goa can really do something about as mythic writes the code.

If that is the case, they would have to take the servers down every(!) time anything crashes.

Sounds like something that needs adressing

 

[Appendix]

[good theory but please don't post suggestions incase someone gets ideas]