Here's the link to the site:
http://ao.gatecentral.com/
Here's what was said:
Exploiters in the community?
Normal players never see strange things - they play and have fun. But there are others who try to exploite, bribe and don't hesitate to do bad things to get much money. Right now some law suits are on stack against various companies and groups of persons who have one thing in common: 'How far can you go to earn money in online-games?'
It all started with Anarchy Online (
AO) and Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC). Some peeps stated to make accounts, powerlevel chars, collected items and tried to sell them for real money on ebay or other auctions. During this time groups gathered who were a bit wiser then others and stated to use exploits - or at least that is what gaming-companies state now. Names like Funcom (
AO), Verant (DAoC) and Blacksnow (group of players) are now well-known and it's like an ongoing soap-opera in the online-gaming-genre.
We brought you at our
AO-fanpage the last statement of Funcom to this case but now new infos came up. At first the following 'spawned' in our mailbox:
False Statements in Funcom’s Press Release Regarding Dispute With BSI.
Funcom’s Press release dated March 14th, 2002, contained Statements that were inaccurate or outright false. An example of these statements would be that our lawsuit with Mythic involved our accounts being banned for exploiting. This is a clear and factual misrepresentation. All of our accounts with Mythic are in good standing and none of our accounts are banned, nor is our lawsuit in any way related to exploitation or in-game misconduct in anyway. Our dispute with Mythic is solely related to the sale of DAOC related services outside of the game.
Other statements made in Funcom’s press release are also false, and we are considering seeking legal redress for the damages caused by libelous statement(s).
Lee Caldwell
Then a visitor came up with two interesting links to unknownplayer.com. These two links try to cover the whole story and hold very interesting text-passages. Here are some examples:
[..]
But the killer are the ICQ Logs given to us by BlackSnow's Lee Caldwell...within this set of logs is some stunning information, but seemingly more harmful to BlackSnow than to FunCom. In it, not only does Lee admit that BlackSnow has hacked, macroed and duped their way to their $60,000 a month income, but he offers Adam Young $7000 to "leave us alone and protect us, and we will always tell you the exploits as they come out and that is undoubtedly a win win for funcom and us."
[..]
The rest of the ICQ log is a stunning admission of the methods of duping, trading non-drop items, macroing and token-selling. What is amazing in this case is that according to sources, Adam was told to negotiate getting the macros and exploits from BlackSnow in exchange for releasing some of the less-dangerous accounts. The problem that cropped up is that Adam slowly overstepped his bounds and began warning Lee of ways to "keep their characters under the radar," so to speak.
[..]
In exchange for their cooperation in resolving the rapid level exploit, I discussed the possibility of releasing some of their accounts. That was until the characters were looked over and some serious item duplication exploits were found. This altered the negotiations, as I could no longer return the other accounts due to the extreme nature of the exploits present. The final arrangement was that I would allow them to retrieve legit personal equipment and credits from their personal
AO play characters to transfer to new characters in addition to some tokens. My rational being that two 1000 token boards on two characters was a worthwhile compromise for eliminating eight serious exploits from the game.
[..]
The two links are as follows: link1 & link2
Got it?
Some are - be it or not - expoiting and selling items for RL-money. Others are detecting it. Then there have been discussions and now it seems that some agreed to deals and others have not. Most interesting is the fact that its the same story like many years ago when hacker got hired by large companies to protect the former victim. What do we call them now? Legalized exploiter for the wellfare of us all? Heroes who fought against the establishment? Bandits who ruin the games many of you love? Whatever may be true.
We try to hang on and come up with more news when they become available to us ..
Editor: Raknar
