Cheating in online games: Encyclopedia II - Cheating in online games - Cheating in MMORPGs

Cheating in online games - Cheating in MMORPGs

While persistent world online games, such as MUDs and MMORPGs, are often subject to the same sorts of mechanical weaknesses to cheating as other online games, as often as not cheating in such games are social cheats, in the form of confidence games. Many of these confidence tricks are based on old-fashioned real-life tricks, or take advantage of the greed or inexperience of new players.

These scams often take the form of uneven trades or outright bad-faith dealing in trades of in-game items. Players will misrepresent the value of their goods to new players, substitute lookalike worthless items for valuable ones, offer to improve items (by crafting raw materials or enhancing equipment) and then just walk away with the item to be improved, or use one of any other con games.

Confidence tricks are often used to steal players' login information. Scammers will pose as the staff of the game, either in e-mail or in the game itself, and ask for the players' login information under any number of pretexts. Alternately, the scammer will offer cheating or automation services, or require that the player give their information as part of initiation into a (nonexistent) clan.

One particularly long-lived scam is the "Alt-F4 scam." In this scam, the scammer tricks the victim into pressing Alt and F4 (the command to exit a program in Windows; similar scams have used Ctrl-W, the command to close a window in Windows, Ctrl-C, the command to interrupt a Telnet connection, or Command-Q, the command to close a program in Mac OS). Sometimes the scammer tells the victim that this will duplicate a dropped item (which the scammer then picks up and absconds with), and sometimes this trick is just used to get rid of an annoying player.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Cheating in MMORPGs", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki