DiosGX Posted August 29, 2015 Share Posted August 29, 2015 I was recently talking to someone about how to handle unsavory sorts in online games, specifically cheaters, when this story came to mind. Figured I'd post it here. --- To lay out some ground work right quick, Phantasy Star Online (PSO) was a pretty cool online game for the Sega Dreamcast back in the early 2000s. First online RPG of any sort I had ever played, and mostly played with my longtime friend I knew from elsewhere on the 'net. He was the brains, I was the psychopath. It worked well for us. Now PSO had really awful security server-side. Mostly because almost everything in the game was calculated client-side, and clients were forced to receive any information sent to them. This included a Pro Action Replay code that forced a player in a certain party slot to change into a quest NPC, replete with level 1 equipment that would over write and delete your equipment and character AND EXP LEVEL. As a result, if you wanted to protect your stuff, you kind of had to fight fire with fire and get a Pro Action Replay of your own. I was one of such people, having lost a character I had been leveling for over 2 real life years along with all the rare equipment I had acquired. I cheated to get my stuff back and resumed playing as normal. One day while messing around with some friends, we had a contest to see who could cheat/hack the most worthless weapon. One of us created a Monkey King Bar, a DBZ Goku-like red pole that extended when swung, and had an invisible stat of being -160% HIT Rate. Game stat wise, this weapon essentially had an accuracy rating of 0.001% even if you were the most accurate class. It was a fun toy to pretend to give someone only for them to find out it was worthless, and I happened to have been a recent recipient of the Joke King Bar. * * * One day me and my buddy Parn are in the Mines areas trying to get a very rare, very much nearly impossible to find enemy part to drop from a very rare enemy. He'd been wanting some S-Red Arms to turn into a pair of twin daggers for half a year, and to no avail for our efforts in that time. Since we had access to a Pro Action Replay, we no longer feared playing in open public games, and we enjoyed talking and playing with complete strangers at times. So here we were in a public game, and this little scrawny nerd-&#! FOnewm, a magic-wielding male elf, comes down and I decide maybe I can mess with him with the Joke King Bar in some way. I equipped it on my RAcast—a giant gun-toting gundam—and spun it around a few times. Immediately the first and only thing he typed, in all caps, "I WANT" while running jagged circles around me to get a better view of its attack animation. FOnewm were capable of equipping the weapon despite it being a melee centric one, so the cards started to play out for something truly epic without my really knowing it. We progressed out of the brightly lit neon sight-posted upper levels of Mines 1, and proceeded down into the murky, dusty depths of Bill Gate's basement and all the murderous robots you would find in such a place. Right at the very end, at the very last room, as we kill the very last enemy before the boss' teleport chamber... the Sinow Red I shot dead dropped a red box, indicative of a rare item drop. My friend Parn stood right atop it, and rather than hitting a button to pick it up, he freaked out and spoke in a manner as such: ASKLDFHIW;OHIKHASOIDFUSAKL;DHFPoihjoihIOPHoihI[PHiophYUIGPUGTYTdfpyuiGYUgupGUiuIohUIFGyuOYUASDHFKJDSAHAFKDSAJ'lkhspaofkja Repeat that for roughly 2 minutes straight. He continues going on his blabbering rampage, and while too busy to turn around and notice... THAT SCRAWNY LITTLE FONEWMN PIECE OF **** RUNS UP AND TAKES IT. HE WASN'T EVEN IN THE ROOM DURING THE BATTLE. Parn immediately just says "....." and nothing else. The little twerp pops off with a single word, all in caps, "FAIR." We enter the boss fight and he sends me a private message that says only "HATE." A few moments later he sends another, "I'm fuming right now. I'm about to throw this TV out the window." Parn was my buddy. More than that, he was really the best friend I had on the internet, and when you're 16 years old, you'll do some crazy S#&$ for your friends. And thankfully, all the cards were already in place. After the boss fight, I tell this guy "yo, I'll trade that Monkey King Bar for your S-Red arms." He says he wants to see the weapon first, and I figure he can't really steal it from me anyway and worst case scenario, I'm just going to hack in a pair of S-Red Arms and give them to Parn. But life had other plans, and so did I. We teleport down to the surface of planet Ragol from the floating celestial utopia of Pioneer 2, and I just drop the MKB on the ground for him to pick up. The whole while, I'm biting my nails because we didn't clear out any enemies near the forest beforehand, and if he tries to take it to attack an enemy, he's going to know something's up with it. Bear in mind, this weapon has an invisible stat of lowering your HIT Rate down to almost zero. He takes it, swings it around for an agonizing five minutes at the air, at which point he promptly drops the S-Red's Arms for me to pick up and says "GOOD TRADE." He then went through a barrier into a room filled with monsters, and there Parn and I stood able to see the damage numbers through the wall, as the game's interface allowed. And there, beyond the veil all we see, in giant red caps lock MISS! MISS! MISS! MISS! MISS! MISS! Soon followed by him being clobbered instantly in a one-hit KO because he thought the weapon would, you know, stunlock enemies that were surrounding him. As we left that game, I stood over his corpse and typed; "FAIR IS RIGHT." * * * PS: When Parn crafted those S-Red's Arms into the daggers, they receive randomized affinity stats. In his case, they had 45% bonus damage vs Altered Beast type enemies, and a completely insane 80% HIT Rate bonus, making them effectively 99% accurate and able to nearly one-shot most cave-dwelling enemies. When all else fails, fight fire by covering your opponent in gasoline and let them immolate themselves from their own stupidity. 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Chroia Posted August 29, 2015 Share Posted August 29, 2015 I have no idea why you typed this up, but thank you. This made my evening ^_^ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DiosGX Posted August 29, 2015 Author Share Posted August 29, 2015 Took me about eight minutes to type out, actually. I'm fast. I did it because I love to write, and this is just another form of it... o 3o Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheErebus. Posted August 29, 2015 Share Posted August 29, 2015 Y'know what was in PSO?Burning Rangers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hortonman Posted August 29, 2015 Share Posted August 29, 2015 "FAIR IS RIGHT" Beautiful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-FV-Metheria Posted August 29, 2015 Share Posted August 29, 2015 "That'll cut'cha back down to size." "Happy Laughter 2" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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