Thread by @ShugoWah

phew, uh

so New Worlds has a massive, catastrophic exploit that's extremely easy and game-breaking and is apparently such a deep-level issue it would take almost an entire rewrite to fix

if you play in windowed mode and click and drag the title bar of the window, no server information can reach your client until you stop doing that

your character is totally invincible (on a capture point in a PVP match for example) until you stop doing that

this is funny in its own right, but the actual meat of the issue is that the brain geniuses at Amazon's game studio have created an MMO where data parity is client-authored. the CLIENT has the final say on what happened, not the server

the economy of the game has already been totally destroyed because people figured out they could dupe items and gold by blocking and unblocking ports during trading

I'll be shocked if Amazon cares enough about this already-dying MMO to put in the man hours required to essentially rewrite the entire netcode. New Worlds came in with a bang and it's gone now

god that is just. so funny and tragic

UPDATE: they managed to fix the iframe bug without massive work somehow

and however they did it introduced a NEW catastrophic bug that makes any gold you should've gotten from an auction house sale while offline disappear

y'think they'll crawl through auction house logs and reimburse hundreds of thousands of sales lmao

"fuck it we'll make the ENTIRE sanity check client-side"

the server tossing an auction house sale packet past your offline client into the void

there's a NEW thing:

you can type arbitrary HTML formatting code into the text chat box, including finding any item icon graphic and blowing it up to ridiculous size

and including generating a link that makes the game crash for anyone that mouses over it

I think this might be a WoW bug from over a decade and a half ago?

ah, I see the "less than half of peak player count" thing going around was putting it nicely

I feel sorry for the devs that were most likely inexperienced/rushed, and I feel sorry for the players that actually saw some potential in the game (as fucking boring/distasteful a premise as it was), but boy it's fun to see amazon elbow brazenly into an industry and just beef it

turns out making/running/supporting a functioning MMO with lasting appeal is pretty hard