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Interview with Jadd
Q: What was the exploit and how did it work?
A: It started with the knowledge that players have "hidden" spells that are castable, for example the unstuck spell is not shown in the spellbook but castable by any player. This is obvious when you're familiar with the wow client. There's many spells like this, some intentionally usable by players and others that existed which obviously shouldn't have. We just threw some simple code to scan all known spell IDs. One spell in particular was supposed to be casted by a non-combat pet, which pulled in critter NPCs and killed them instantly, but as it happens it was also castable by a player. You couldn't just cast it on anyone, but we found that without specifying a target at all it would "self-cast" and instantly kill the caster. Naturally the next step was to mind control someone and send the spell cast. Internally, while mind controlling someone it would send a different packet - pet spell cast - which looks identical to a regular spell cast packet alongside the identifier of which "pet" we are casting from. It worked while mind controlling someone, and we later found that for whatever reason the server allowed this particular spell to bypass the checks they had in place to detect if we owned a particular pet. That means it could be used on any player or unit in the game.
Q: Did you expect it to hit the main stream news
A: Not really, we were messing with streamers so it was bound to blow up in their particular communities but never really expected it to reach mainstream media as it did. We were quite young (under 1
and naive at the time.Q: Was it the first/last time you had done something like that?
A: First and last time I did something publicly that was so extreme - these days I realise the value behind zero-day exploits and they have a much, much higher demand and monetary value today than ever before. Talking 5-6 figures per exploit.
Q: "First and last time I did something publicly that was so extreme - these days I realise the value behind zero-day exploits and they have a much, much higher demand and monetary value today than ever before. Talking 5-6 figures per exploit." Can you elaborate on this at all? People tend to be very interested in the money behind stuff like this.
A: People pay for gold, so an exploit to generate gold is worth (at the very least) the projected cost of employees to gather it by hand, as well as the profit from selling the gold. How long these exploits last depend on the game and the company behind it. For example - say it generally takes an average of 10 days until the exploit is fixed and the amount of gold you can generate in a day can net you the same amount as 20 employees working for 16 hours. You saved about $1000USD on wages and you can sell the gold for $2000USD. Now multiply it by the 10 days that the exploit lasts and you've made $30000USD. There's some other expenditures to consider, like the cost of game accounts, high level characters, or other costs required by the exploit. But typically this cost is quite low and doesn't deduct much from the final profit.
Q: How long were you playing WoW before you started doing super exploits such as that?
A: I started programming in about 2008 and had my own packet tools and first major exploits in around 2010-2011. I would have been about 15 at the time.
Q: Were you punished by Blizzard? I assume the account was banned but did they contact you or anything extra?
A: They served me documents from their lawyers through the mail. The exploit you're referring to was in 2012 and I was underage then too, but I don't think they realised this. After we told them that, they mostly left me alone. I haven't personally heard from Blizzard in a long time now, but someone I work with almost exclusively had a pretty funny interaction with them just over a year ago, when they showed up at his apartment. You should watch this interview, it will give you a good insight: Interview With MMO Hacker - YouTube
Q: Have any exploits of this level popped up in the last expansion or two regardless if they were executed at such an insane level as yours? Or are these types of exploits few and far between these days.
A: Yes, there are exploits that grant you more power than just killing things. You could dupe millions of gold, items, characters - whatever you want - in a matter of minutes. Unfortunately for us, due to Blizzard's past experience with these kinds of exploits, they have systems to mitigate damage to their economy, environment, etc. and including ways of flagging you for immediate inspection. Major exploits don't last very long with Blizzard, so other games are typically a better target. Chinese and mobile games have by far the largest potential for profit.
Warcraft 3 Reforged Tomorrow!
The beloved RTS remake is coming out tomorrow! Better yet if you pre-order you have been able to play the beta all this time. WC3 is coming with a full campaign makeover, new additions to campaign and graphics, a fully functional ladder, and of course most peoples favorite....the custom games. Personally I am looking forward to the Tower Defenses such as Farm TD, Gem TD, and maybe some Run Kitty Run to top it off. Warcraft 3 Reforged is a must buy in my eyes and it will be very interesting to see what people do with the custom map editor this time around.
AV Changes in Classic
#NoChanges is finally over and it seems Blizzard is taking the reigns on the Battleground issue that is the AV grind. If you don't know Classic WoW has had its community split once BG's came out. If you wanted to rank you have lived inside Alterac Valley the last 2 months and if you didn't want to rank you have either been farming gold, leveling an alt, or just taking a break. There is no in between especially for our beloved Warsong Gulch. Since AV came out in its 1.12 state the honor you obtained from it was far superior than any other method. Since AV is only solo queue and not realm specific it basically felt like you were zombie grinding by yourself and the MMO aspect. that Classic fans promise you exists in Vanilla, just wasn't there anymore. So Blizzard has made some changes and it seems to be for the better.
- Honorless targets unlootable intended to further discourage camping the starting caves efficiently.
So this was done because right now the meta for Alliance premades is to use Discord to get into the same game with like-minded players. To do this you have to be Alliance since their queues are instant. Once you all queue you see which number AV you got into. Lets say most people got into AV 112 and your AV pop says 88. Since you have instant queues you're going to deny the queue pop of 88 and re-queue specifically for 112 and instantly get in the one the majority of your Discord premade got into. Due to this a ton of AV's were like 40 horde 20 Alliance because Alliance are dodging queues left and right. When an imbalance like this occurs Horde camp the caves for HK's and this is why I think the change was made , to prevent that camping.
- Alterac Valley will now allow parties up to 5. When you queue together you get into same BG
This a good thing in my opinion. The grind in itself with AV is completely boring and you never really see people in the games that you know since it includes every realm in your region. Allowing people to queue as 5 at least ads some of that MMO aspect to the grind. Any addition to play with friends is good. This will benefit Horde more than Alliance due to how Alliance premades are formed with instant queues talked about above.
- There will no longer be a number in the name of the BG.
Like I mentioned above with how Alliance get into games together to basically form 40 man premades, now those numbers don't exist. Due to this fact Alliance premades are most likely dead.
- We're fixing a setting that allowed the battleground to start with as few as 20 players on a team.
Once again as mentioned above due to Alliance premades there are tons of games that end up 40 horde v 15-20 Alliance. This was not really good for the Alliance not doing the Discord premade meta so this fix should attack that as well.
- Honor will be decreased by 25% per repeated kill. Honor will only decrease by 10% per kill in World PVP and BG's.
This will make killing people much more viable. For awhile people were just running past each other and getting the game done as soon as possible. With this change big battles over and over technically might be a viable option. Also this could mean Warsong Gulch gets a bump in players queuing it.
Clips of the Week
In Honor of Kobe Bryant
Smash Commentators improvised on the spot!
Linus from LTT might retire?!
I don't think EA answered this call
IDK If I love my Coworkers this much
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