Old Glitches and Exploits

@ Numa Pompilius: Thanks, your response was exactly what I was looking for when creating this thread. Seems you're one of the few that actually read the OP.

"Simple" packet sniffing, huh? So people went out of their way to exploit the game in most of these cases. Too bad, I guess I naively thought these were stumbled upon by accident.

taking the ghostly off the altar after you cap in hoh/courtyard matches and running him around the map was always hilarious

the dupe exploit was just a simple trade and disconnect. probably inspired from some of the d2 dupes. fenix and i posted it after we reported how it was done and it was patched.

Enko is right, funnily enough it was literally the exact method used in Diablo to dupe things in GW. Anet MADE Diablo...so you'd think they'd have learned....right guys?

Right guys?


Guys?

gl getting an answer to that fenix, anyway the one that pain mentioned, where you get a blank account thing was creepy as $%#&, i pissed my pants as well, when it happened the first time.

Using Protective Bond and certain +energy gain skills to cause an infinite flow of energy loss and gain resulting in the server you were on crashing from overflow.

(note: this is still completely possible but you have to be smart to work around it since they nerfed PBond)

I have to agree nothing could beat having an inventory full of perfect crystallines with almost no effort from getting junk loot/keyless goodies.

yeah there's been a long list of exploits over the years...

the first pre-searing items exploit was very simple...they allowed travel to guild hall from pre for a short time during the first christmas event.

i personally was able to use the team-increasing glitch. it had to do with party members adding heroes, and the leader couldnt add 3 of his own if i remember correctly. the biggest party we were able to get was 29. i suppose it could have been more in urgoz or the deep but we didnt try.

a lot of times, a glitch that they fix is un-fixed with the following patch, then they do a second patch fixing it again soon after...so if you learn of a glitch after they fix it, just wait till the next update and test it right after they push it. for some reason they forget to add it to whatever it is they need to make it permanent a lot of the time.

of course use a second account when messing around because abusing any glitch or exploit makes you subject to a ban

The Mallyx "Exploit" Like several fo the ones you named was more of a hack to start.

Inside the dat file is where all the data is stored such as outposts, maps, quest all the 3d models and textures ect...

There is a available tool to extract files and images from the dat file. Someone figured out that there was a secret outpost and most likely figured out a way, probably by emulating a certain packet sent on logging out, to set that outpost to his last visited outpost when logging in or something of the sort.

After one person did it though he could ferry groups of 8 from a guild hall into this secret outpost and that how it was mostly spread. The outpost itself looked exactly the same as another outpost in the realm of torment but had no NPCs or storage. On the right of the screen was an Enter Mission Button just like there would be in any Mission town. On hitting it your party was taken in to defeat Mallyx Over and Over without the previous 4 quests.


This outpost is one of many interesting little things you can find by snooping through the data file. There is the groundwork for a in game auction house, unused henchman and all other sorts of goodies.

Is this thread talking about Exploit(s) in general or just one single exploit, may I please talk about other PvP related exploit? I thought I make sure before getting into trouble again.

@ Pumkin Pie: Any glitch or exploit, but mostly about how they're discovered. I've never looked for one, but I've also never been "lucky" enough to discover one either.

Once, during Dunes, the Ghostly wound up in a spot where none of the ranged mobs could hit him, and none of the melee mobs went up the stairs due to getting stuck on the ranged mobs. I just had my H/H flagged on top of the ramp, waiting for the timer to run out. Not really a glitch, just poor AI pathing.

There was "PartyKill" exploit which allowed person in RA leave party and become hostile to them. Hilarity Ensued with Trapper doing this.

Guys, there's seriously a good reason why these things are illegal in many countries (ArenaNet could sue you since Guru is hosted in the USA) and banned on a lot of forums: while this information may not be so harmful in the hands of "relatively responsible" people, it's a disaster if it inspires certain "less ethical" people to break stuff, try to trick other people, etc. It may even make a kid want to try it "for fun" and get his account banned.

I know it sounds like a Star Wars or Good vs. Evil story, but the security field does have "white hat" and "black hat" hackers, and they all play with the same techniques and tricks. It's quite "nasty" for the common computer user, to the point of illegality sometimes (but sometimes laws are "wrong"!). Don't come to the dark side or you'll loose your wings .
There are books on these things (e.g. Exploiting Online Games by Hoglund and McGraw, nice high-level overview but unfortunately too centered on WoW), websites (playNoEvil is a very nice, clean blog), etc. Things become very nasty when you no longer play the game as a game, but play it as a software .

On a more ethical ground (and thus open to critics and point of view, it's not about right and wrong), I believe that it's plain wrong to do this stuff for other things than software testing/bug finding. These software bugs will always exist but if we can, as a community, understand that the fun is beyond that (i.e., in actually playing the game, rather than simply winning and accumulate numbers/ranks/titles/virtual achievements), that it's not in our best interest to try to bypass "rules" even if they're virtual, then our game experience is improved, globally. If we let the route of exploits be open, even as a "possibility" in the mind of people, our game experience is weakened, globally. You can' directly change people, but you can set an example.

P.S.: I perfectly understand that the OP question spawns from curiosity, it's human nature and a good quality of a scientist .

I don't remember that one, but I do the one where you could disconnect everyone in the instance (by sending specific unicode char as text. I think it was 0xFFFF).

2 more from the top of my hat that I've seen in work:
- There was a tool that let you see stats of unidentified items (that was pre-factions).
- SoA axe. This was more of a bug (2x20%ench FTW).

Yes.
Many are, of course. I've found and reported a few, but I've not really been looking. The most impressive I've found was the "Gear Tank" AI exploit (if someone was carrying anything - a book, keg, gear etc - mobs would only target him). I probably wasn't the first to find it, but I was the first to report it.

Sometimes people come across them merly by mistake but when they decide to replicate what happens it where the problem is. People could teleport to the party leaders last location through visiting guild halls ambassadore i believe was the result of a bug in a update. Could be wrong though.
Most as indicated are done by packet sniffers intentionally - some for good ..some not
I don't wanna give people ideas but i assume different combiantions of acessing npcs etc are used and commands with special prefixes when typing messages.
I admire Pablo though, hes got many secret exploits no doubt benefitted from but we'll let him have it just cuz he released the information to get it fixed.

God, I loved my axe...for the few days that I had it. Selling five of them wasn't a bad thing either....

And sending "unicode char as text" sounds so simple. Not. Prolly requires access to whatever crazy voodoo the practitioners of coding use to work their magic.

Yeah. I enjoyed mine for almost 2 days before it turned to crap. Sold enough of un-modded ones to pay for modded one.

Or how about the good old Keg/Book trick? : P
Just let the Warrior(with a Tank build) hold it and all the mobs will attack him, making nukers extremely effective xD

The Mallyx glitches and exploits were the most retarded glitches ever. If people hadn't been dumb and would have not bothered with it and instead adapted there builds to a certain scenario, they could have gone in and beaten mallyx in 20 minutes instead of an hour. (*cough* like rathoh, rob, and trub did [and they did it with 5 heroes]*cough*) That wasn't the PvE communities finest hour.

edit: same mallyx exploit? idk - there was one with glitching the priest and then glitching mallyx in the door. mainly because people were bad. just so we're clear.