[MUD-Dev] BIZ: Online consoles and MUDs

[Neil Brown]

--- Peter Tyson <peter_tyson at softhome.net> wrote:

> And we know that Phantasy Star showed that the MUD-type game prooved
> popular with console audiences..

They also showed what a royal pain it is when someone hacks your
console RPG and you don't have any method of plugging the hole the
hackers are now using to drive off your subscribed playerbase.
Sending a v2.0 CD/DVD/cartridge out to all your paying customers is an
expense that comes right out of your pocket, and how long is v2.0
going to last before it too falls to the hacking masses and you have
to cut v3.0?

There were several roundtables at GDC discussing hacking of online
games and what a pain it is to prevent it from happening and
eventually repair the damage when it does happen.  It sounded like
some form of hack was pretty much an inevitable occurrence for any
online product.

Several people also suggested that network-transported patches could
be used for consoles with hard drives, but others who were supposedly
"in the know" said that publishers really don't want to hear about how
you can "fix up" your supposedly finished product after it has been
released.  I guess console publishers aren't yet ready for the sort of
ongoing maintenance, support, update lifecycle that we've seen with
UO/EQ/AC et al.

The degree to which hacking affects your product is, of course,
entirely dependent on how your product is designed.  If all it does is
act as a terminal for a game that is run on the server, then hacks may
not be as severe as if it had embedded game logic which could be
manipulated by malicious parties.  It could, however, still fall
victim to such things as network packet sniffing/hacking, packet
replay, aim bots ( if aiming matters ) etc.  In the discussions at
GDC, there were some good ideas for protecting the client code and
network traffic, but most of it was just obfuscation rather than true
security which is nearly impossible if nothing about the client can be
trusted in the first place.

-o-
Neil

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