Earthworm
Exotic Dancers Club Exalted.
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Posted - 2008.12.15 20:56:00 -
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Originally by: Princess Jodi Let me relay a tale where another company had a similar issue....
Back in my college days I worked in a pinball Arcade. One of the hottest new games (Tempest? Was long time ago...) had a gimmick where you could continue playing on the same level you lost the last game by putting in more money. People would cash $20 bills and stack the quarters on the machine to reserve it. It just raked in the money.
Working till 2AM me and my buddies started noticing wierd things with the machine. For a game that gave one play for a quarter, we would occasionally find large numbers of free replays on it. Like 70+ free games. BTW: this game did not give out free replays.
After months of sleuthing this is what we discovered: If you played a game and made it past level 21 (not too hard to do), then ended your game with a score of 11 or 77, then let the credits roll by once the game would give you 99 FREE GAMES.
11 caused the Quarter Counter to rack up 99 games while 77 caused no Quarter Counter movement.
Now, our Manager got mad cuz she thought we were using the free tokens to play the game ourselves. Then they thought we were stealing cuz the quarters didn't match the counter.
The reality of the situation did not come out till a year later. Seems some programmer designed the codes so that he and his buddies could play for free. The company was forced to replace all the chips in the machines with ones without the bug. Of course, they only did this if you complained or threatened to sue them.
Years later, I saw someone playing on the 'Invisible Levels' that were above 99. Since I rarely made it there I asked how he did it. He told me of a futher cheat by ending in 39 which allowed you to start on level 99. We traded cheats.
Now, this Starbase Exploit is similar. You had to run 2 successful cycles then shut off the silos. That's buried pretty deep for someone to find if they are bug hunting.
CCP, if this was just a bug then I understand how it was not found. But look at the code closely, please.... you just might find something that shouldn't be there.
Agreed, this was a very cool story to read while sitting here at work :) I'm hoping for full transparency here btw regarding the CSM meeting, just more to see how deep this goes versus rabid-emo-market-whine.
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