Elite: Dangerous and the game within the game (or why 13th Legion are heroes)
- Thread starter MissMeYet
- Start date
They're not alone in that thought.
Like, no doubt, many of the other folks on here who have 30+ years in the IT biz, I've done my time working in security-focused roles...
There's this thing called "responsible disclosure"
You find a vulnerability...
You probe it enough to prove it CAN be exploited and maybe even in the process develop a proof of concept method...
Now at this point you're just like every other geek in the known universe, we all poke at stuff to see where it can break and what kind of pretty pieces fall off when it does.
Unless you're a black hat or in this case a game cheat, what you don't do at this point is go off and start exploiting it for yourself and/or your buddies. (Yes, I know there are real-world "grey areas" like so-called hacktivism or other ways of "sticking it to the man" or targets that for one reason or another "had it coming" - they don't apply in the context of game cheating so I'm specifically not addressing those here. There is no "greater good" in cheating a game.)
You document it for the folks responsible for the faulty code. In this context that means a bug report to FD, made via a ticket, not a publicly readable forum post. Then you give them a reasonable time to do something about it.
If they do nothing you disseminate the info to the wider security community - this is still not "going public" with it and you're not releasing it "into the wild". You're simply recruiting fellow-advocates who may have a more effective communication channel to the folks who can fix it than you do. Here this would be talking to players with a presumably decent channel to FD, people who have stepped up as ambassadors, leaders of community groups, even forum moderators since they may be presumed to have some proper way of getting FD community management to take a look.
Only in the last resort do you go public.
AND YOU STILL DON'T USE IT YOURSELF OR ENCOURAGE ANYONE ELSE TO - In fact, if you become aware of anyone doing so you report them as loudly as you can.
There has been no evidence that 13th Legion followed this responsible path. So no. Nothing heroic there at all.
There's this thing called "responsible disclosure"
You find a vulnerability...
You probe it enough to prove it CAN be exploited and maybe even in the process develop a proof of concept method...
Now at this point you're just like every other geek in the known universe, we all poke at stuff to see where it can break and what kind of pretty pieces fall off when it does.
Unless you're a black hat or in this case a game cheat, what you don't do at this point is go off and start exploiting it for yourself and/or your buddies. (Yes, I know there are real-world "grey areas" like so-called hacktivism or other ways of "sticking it to the man" or targets that for one reason or another "had it coming" - they don't apply in the context of game cheating so I'm specifically not addressing those here. There is no "greater good" in cheating a game.)
You document it for the folks responsible for the faulty code. In this context that means a bug report to FD, made via a ticket, not a publicly readable forum post. Then you give them a reasonable time to do something about it.
If they do nothing you disseminate the info to the wider security community - this is still not "going public" with it and you're not releasing it "into the wild". You're simply recruiting fellow-advocates who may have a more effective communication channel to the folks who can fix it than you do. Here this would be talking to players with a presumably decent channel to FD, people who have stepped up as ambassadors, leaders of community groups, even forum moderators since they may be presumed to have some proper way of getting FD community management to take a look.
Only in the last resort do you go public.
AND YOU STILL DON'T USE IT YOURSELF OR ENCOURAGE ANYONE ELSE TO - In fact, if you become aware of anyone doing so you report them as loudly as you can.
There has been no evidence that 13th Legion followed this responsible path. So no. Nothing heroic there at all.
I dont think Fdev will go this Far https://www.polygon.com/2015/5/6/8559503/guild-wars-2-cheater-banned-video But i think the stripping of every ship / stored module & CR could be dun
My view on this is Why have 13th legion chosen NOW to leak this information, if its been known by them and others for months.
Putting my conspiracy hat on, it makes me wonder if they have discovered a better way of cheating the system, and they just want to therefore shut down the original one, knowledge of which has been out in the wild for some time. They then end up with exclusive access to guaranteed god mods via their new secret method.
Putting my conspiracy hat on, it makes me wonder if they have discovered a better way of cheating the system, and they just want to therefore shut down the original one, knowledge of which has been out in the wild for some time. They then end up with exclusive access to guaranteed god mods via their new secret method.
Yup this was my thought as well. They probably found a way to hack mats to get multiples or something crazy that is harder to trace. Else why would they risk getting punished? If not in a gamble to pull up the ladder behind them. Heroes... Bah. I'll believe that when I see people hold their own heads up high in basket AFTER they roll for this.
Last edited:
Absolutely not. It has nothing to do with PvP. (I thought the integrity of Open PvP was already flapping in the wind as it was?)
This is about Elite Dangerous. Why should it be to the 100% satisfaction of the PvP community?
There's far more insidious things that FD can do to the worst offenders though, they could just take a leaf out of how many developers deal with pirated copies by subtly altering how the game works for them such as the invincible pink scorpion on Serious Sam 3 rather than outright preventing things from working and apply a similar logic to exploiters.
For example, rather than outright banning them, FD could simply remove all the exploited mods from their equipment then silently add an invisible tag onto their account that alters the distribution of the RNG on engineer mods for them forevermore. They wouldn't know what's going on when they attempt to remod their gear, they would likely put it down to RNG being against them and would never know that their account is specifically tagged to ensure that decent engineer rolls are much rarer. As long as FD don't tell anyone about their tagging engineer exploiter accounts in this manner, then the exploiters will continue working harder than everyone else to achieve the same results without even realising it is actually their account that is at fault and not just the RNG being against them.
IF that is true, that is the worst thing.
I don't want FD to be insidious - I want it obvious and savage, so that FD won't need to name or shame anyone, they'll happily out themselves all over these forums by throwing a monstrous salty snit with a side-order of flounce
I don't want FD to be insidious - I want it obvious and savage, so that FD won't need to name or shame anyone, they'll happily out themselves all over these forums by throwing a monstrous salty snit with a side-order of flounce
I like the way you think.
It may not be 100% about PvP, but it is about going out into open. My motivation for taking my ship out where I may encounter anyone from the well known groups (community goals, alien sites, etc) just went down significantly. Given that the ones exploiting are the big well known groups that are too big to fail, I don't expect anything other that slaps on the wrist and some escape goats - some well known PvPer will make a big show on the forums about how unfair his ban is, and quietly return about a month later. Engineering is now effectively split between PvE tier and PvP tier.
Last edited:
We're not even sure that it was them. The original leak came from an anonym bug report in the newly created 2.3.10 beta section, which has been deleted since. I tried to do a reddit post about it, but got blocked by mods.
Did I see a FPS game that had a hacker who had coded a god mode for himself - when they had investigated one of the power devs took over his character during play, and walked him to a public area, undressed himself down to his pants infront of everyone, climbed a high building and threw himself off, killign the character and permanently banning the player! (Maybe Assassin or something?)
I stopped playing in Open because of the grief around CGs. So did a lot of others.
So they started UA bombing the stations to grief the CGs by proxy.
If they are playing the BGS for their own system they may have affected you and you not realised it.
We've seen Rares go off market because of a faction swing. That has affected some CGs.
So yes, the repercussions go way beyond pew pewing in open.
Actually it's not the worst thing. The worst thing would be failing to remove the ILLEGAL MODS from accounts. It's bad enough that they've been in the game for a whole year. But failing to patch it looks like tacit condonance.
And that makes it hard to say who is guilty of blatant exploiting, and who is just assuming Frontier doesn't really see this as a serious flaw because they failed to fix it for a YEAR. As much as I hate this defense, it's not completely illegitimate considering how many other seeming cheats are allowed or even outright condoned for long periods of time until they are patched out.But in those cases it's just money, and people are allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains. That policy simply CANNOT be allowed to extend to engineer-hacked items.
Bah! This is very frustrating. My primary concern is: How can they make this right? If guilt is a grey area then punishment may need to be grey as well, but what is absolutely certain is that these ILLEGAL mods need to be removed from accounts post haste.
Last edited:
Hey, just wanted to let you know how trivial this exploit is. So prior to making my video, I had used this method a total of ZERO times. In fact, the video was my first successful attempt at the exploit. Now I'm not saying that because I fear some repercussion; it's the truth. I had a total of 1100 Grade 5 rolls completed up to this point, all done legitimately. So last night I wanted to see if I could make an improvement on some Clipper drives. Keep in mind the drives in question are already 138 optimal multiplier. Did about 200 rolls using this trick and got... absolutely nothing. Best roll I got was around 136. So what's the point? That this trick is pretty much useless to an end game player. In order to get a 140+ drive, I would probably have to make around 400-500 rolls, and even if I did it, what would i I have? A drive that goes probably 5 m/s faster than what I already have. All the people saying that this is "game-breaking" are just wrong. At worst, this makes below-average players just slightly more average. The sky isn't falling people, because this isn't game breaking. And FD won't do anything because in the scheme of things, this bug isn't that helpful. It's much worse for the game when people can make several billion credits in a day or so. Just my 2 cents.
I'd never even heard of this until today.
Someone was nice enough to tip me off to what this actually was, and even sent a link to a video of someone doing it.
And.. it's not only lame, but requires some feats of dexterity that are definitely beyond me.
But I can't help but wonder how many people, not unlike myself, will first hear of these kinds of shenanigans here and feel compelled to try them before they're patched out? And that is a rhetorical question, so if your don't speak rhetorical, well.. I'm no translator but.. just don't. Don't be pathetic.
Someone was nice enough to tip me off to what this actually was, and even sent a link to a video of someone doing it.
And.. it's not only lame, but requires some feats of dexterity that are definitely beyond me.
But I can't help but wonder how many people, not unlike myself, will first hear of these kinds of shenanigans here and feel compelled to try them before they're patched out? And that is a rhetorical question, so if your don't speak rhetorical, well.. I'm no translator but.. just don't. Don't be pathetic.
Still here eh?
I agree with this. And because of RNG it could be 1000+ rolls. Even with the exploit it is still miserable game play.
Having done 100's of roles for G1 rail guns just to get a good heat reduction where the mats are already easy to get. I can barely stand that.