For the past couple of weeks, players have been reporting very suspicious activity on expired housing plots in ArcheAge. For those unfamiliar, the first person to claim a spot when it opens up because of tax-payment failure, gets the land. Claimable land is at a premium, and therefore, it's very hotly contested.
Making things worse, some unscrupulous people and/or hackers are using an out-of-game program to track expired land and claim it before anyone else can, even if they're not physically present. Today, on Reddit, Trion CEO Scott Hartsman responded:
"I do appreciate that people are pointing this out. Seriously. The amount of effort going into finding a way to deduce when/if/what outside of the game is being used is rather extreme. What's legit vs what isn't is frequently extremely challenging to tell, even when you have total control of the code.
Unlike in the case where its our own game, where we can (and do) add new instrumentation/logging/
detection daily until problems get stomped with prejudice, we're limited here in only being able to act on what the game throws off as outputs to us. We can't add new ones. That said, this one is the next biggest priority. New theory being worked on right now, will holler if it pans out and we can act on it with confidence."
He then followed up with more info:
"Yes, there is a team of people researching and tracking, then prioritizing detection and action.
You usually don't have to do a lot of hardcore reverse engineering - Most of what these things do is fairly obvious from either casual observation or at most a little packet sniffing. What people call "hacks" these days are very seldom complex. In the majority case, they usually just find a weakness and poke at it in a very obvious way. The challenge tends to be in detecting that behavior on the server side and blocking/acting on that, without acting on legitimate people."
This is all excellent news, at least that Trion's aware and working on the research and solution with XLGAMES. Hopefully a fix to prevent this will come in sooner rather than later.
Source: Reddit - http://www.reddit.com/r/
