A story from Poland about how a browser MMORPG deals with a group of players who became all-powerful due to a bug in the game. There seems to be quite a few issues.
What is the MMORPG Margonem?
- This is an MMORPG from 2006, played among other places in Poland. Like the German MMORPG Tibia, it was developed by a group of students.
- Originally, Margonem was just a hobby project, but it became so popular that it turned into a business for the students. It is a browser-based MMORPG where players complete quests, develop their heroes, and compete against powerful monsters. Margonem is a free-to-play MMORPG.
- The game is also available on Steam but has virtually no players there. However, around 15,000 concurrent players are active on Polish and English-speaking servers, as the game’s stats show (via margonem).
Player simply changes the description of an item, becomes all-powerful
What did a player do? As reported by a Polish MMORPG site, a student discovered in October 2022 how to become all-powerful in the MMORPG (via mmmorpg.or).
He changed the description of an item in the MMORPG. By adding a semicolon, he was able to create an amulet that gives 777 points to all stats. As he explains, all items together at level 160 normally only provide between 200 and 500 stats.
He and some of his friends could create a handful of mega-items through this exploit and walked through the MMORPG with absurdly high stats, able to do whatever they wanted and were overpowered. The Polish site writes:
During this time, they simply destroyed every content in the game, solo-killed bosses, monsters, players, literally everything fell before their mighty sword, axe, or whatever they had crafted.
Developers recognize the bug but let them go for 6 months
This was the special part: Relatively quickly after they exploited the bug, the developers recognized one of the items as a bug and reset it.
The players now expected the developers to take all their items away and ban them. But nothing happened for 5 months.
Only on April 25, six months after they started the blatant cheating, did the developer take their items away and permanently ban them from the game.
Cheater can escape the ban by exploiting a loophole
Are the players banned? As the student explains, he was able to talk his way out of this completely justified permanent ban because he referred to a loophole in the rules that he cannot be banned if he uses an item that was previously allowed by the developers.
With this argument, he was actually able to talk his way out of the ban and even got his items back, albeit with normal stats.
But he doesn’t want to continue playing anymore. He says the situation is so absurd that he is quitting. The incident opened his eyes.
Chinese invests 1.3 million € in MMORPG character – friend sells it for 500€
