Taking a look at today's "Most Popular Games" section of MMORPG.com's homepage reveals what has become an extremely common occurence - the spamming of the Darkfall section of this site to run up the hit count.

DF has not been the only beneficiary of such dishonest and puerile tactics, but it has been the most regular recipient.

If there are that many people actually playing Darkfall that they can land that many uniques from a sub-section of their playerbase then they evidently deserve more credit than I give them. Kudos the DF fans, man.

I was in the process of creating a thread in the pub and saw this one when I went to refresh the counter.  Figure I'll just use this one instead.

I don't get it.  Topics in the Darkfall forum are barely active, the general feeling surrounding the game is dissapointment and the face of the Dev team is associated with deception. Yet, for the past month Darkfall has produced 2x more hits than any other game. 

I was thinking it might be due to asian interest or DF2.0 curiosity.  But hit spam seems more likely. 

I have a feeling if this was Mortal Online it wouldn't be such an issue.

Most popular game counter has been manipulated before several different times.  Many times a random game was bumped up to knock Mortal Online out of the 10th position.  (For some reason Mortal Online seems to have a huge forum post count for the relatively small niche playerbase it has.)  I don't think its a collective effort from the Darkfall community, but rather it's probably one or two hackers with to much time on there hands.

Maybe when Darkfall 2 gets released and they wipe all the accounts that grinded up through exploits and cheats and make it so the grind isn't reminicient of a Korean MMO it could become a decent game.  

As it stand right now many playercities are almost indefensible because of poor design.  It looks like Darkfall developers are fixing this with Darkfall 2.  

Funny you should mention this - I just sent an email to the team this AM when I saw this.  And it is not a new thing - the same thing appears true for the Weekly and Monthly reports.  Our database guy can take a deeper look at the IP data to see if anything fishy is going on here.  While we have nothing against Darkfall I would agree that these numbers don't jive with activity on this game in the site.

They probably macro'd it the same as they do their skills :P

Originally posted by Admin

Funny you should mention this - I just sent an email to the team this AM when I saw this.  And it is not a new thing - the same thing appears true for the Weekly and Monthly reports.  Our database guy can take a deeper look at the IP data to see if anything fishy is going on here.  While we have nothing against Darkfall I would agree that these numbers don't jive with activity on this game in the site.

 I thought something was off but it might be I don't look at it often enough.  If others are also seeing it then it could be true. 

Originally posted by Ex0dUs101

They probably macro'd it the same as they do their skills :P

I loled

You know a friend of mine made a fairly complicated 2 player macro that leveled up a weapon and shield skill at the same time.  We ran this macro overnight every night for nearly a month before we were done with the grind.  

On a serious note I think you need a unique IP address for every click in order for it to count.  If this is the case were talking about some real hacking here.  Maybe someone has a legion of hacked zombie computers doing the clicking, or maybe it's someone who just has WAY to much free time pressing the reset button on there router.  Either way they're doing a good job of keeping Mortal Online out of the top ten.  

There is a thread about this on their official forums, I wondered when it was going to hit here. I hope it gets traced back to Aventurine, that would be fucking HILARIOUS.

well i can say one thing about Darkfall, right now its a dead game with all the bull about 2.0. No one is playint becasue there may be a wipe of all chars.

What if they had modified the game client to act as a http proxy to post in the forums from a central server?

Neocron 2 also seems very high.

Tracing it back could prove to be difficult.  I do alot of my "internet-ing" through a VPN.  This gives me a high degree of anonymity while online.  Additionally, the many servers through out the world give me access to over 15k different IP adresses.

Theoretically, someone in the know could hit a web page/site multiple thousands of times a day with a different IP each time.

~Harrysun

Originally posted by Mad+Dog

well i can say one thing about Darkfall, right now its a dead game with all the bull about 2.0. No one is playint becasue there may be a wipe of all chars.

You're playing. dont see you moan much about playerbase in game are you bored or something :D

Originally posted by Hairysun

Tracing it back could prove to be difficult.  I do alot of my "internet-ing" through a VPN.  This gives me a high degree of anonymity while online.  Additionally, the many servers through out the world give me access to over 15k different IP adresses.

Theoretically, someone in the know could hit a web page/site multiple thousands of times a day with a different IP each time.

 

~Harrysun

I thought most websites have blocks that block most of the common proxies?  

How would they find 50k+ proxies that are not blocked by MMORPG.com?

Also Neocron 2 may be bumped up as well to keep other games off the list.  Hmm.. I wonder what game the hackers are trying to keep off the list.

They could just drop support for darkfall and neocron 2 and not worry about getting any hits.

Originally posted by username509

Originally posted by Hairysun

Tracing it back could prove to be difficult.  I do alot of my "internet-ing" through a VPN.  This gives me a high degree of anonymity while online.  Additionally, the many servers through out the world give me access to over 15k different IP adresses.

Theoretically, someone in the know could hit a web page/site multiple thousands of times a day with a different IP each time.

 

~Harrysun

I thought most websites have blocks that block most of the common proxies?  

How would they find 50k+ proxies that are not blocked by MMORPG.com?

 

 

Also Neocron 2 may be bumped up as well to keep other games off the list.  Hmm.. I wonder what game the hackers are trying to keep off the list.

Lol...... 50K+.  I clicked on the screen shot after your post.  Had no idea the difference between first and second was 40k-ish.

One proxy server will give you a range of IPs to work with. I believer it is 999 IPs per server but could be mistaken.  However, your right , 50k unique hits is just plain silly.

Yeah, I'd be quite surprised if those hits have been generated legitimately too, but you never know.

In all seriousness though, who really gives a shit about a popularity counter anyway? Besides, look at all the other trash that's on that list, TOR... WoW... Rift...CoH..... Come on! However those games got so popular will always be a myth to me (well, maybe not star wars, because it's star wars).

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Originally posted by Mad+Dog
well i can say one thing about Darkfall, right now its a dead game with all the bull about 2.0. No one is playint becasue there may be a wipe of all chars.

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What would be funny, is if all they are doing is having there patcher do a background hit on the darkfall section on mmorpg.com . That wouldnt be hard to do, and then every day everyone that logs into Darkfall generates a unique hit for them on here and they never know it.

I doubt mmorpg.com will post what they find but, I doubt its anything other then something malicious going on.