Light the torches, sharpen your pitch forks and say hello to death sentences for all online game hackers. A player who has been reeking havoc upon the Guild Wars 2 players was recently stripped, lead onto a high bridge and forced to jump to his digital death below. I have heard of human heads courtesy of the Mexican drug cartel but this is a message if I have ever seen one. Take a gander at the video link posted by the security team leader — link below.
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DarkSide – the hacker’s character’s name, was using a series of illegal super abilities, anabolic cheats, impossible teleporting across the map and dealing ridiculous damage dominate player to player interactions. ArenaNet, the creators of Guild Wars opened up a can of your favorite episode of CSI to track down the alleged online killer, using a series of Youtube videos (like CCTV footage) and player’s descriptions (witness testimonies). The staff on the security team at ArenaNet and their leader Chris Clearly posted a video of their sentencing, killing, removing and banning of DarkSide and his other accounts from the Guild Wars game.
It’s a case that’s been getting a lot of attention but how do players in other game universes go about getting justice?
Forget about your personal late night quests to save your kingdom, killing online is big business for Call of Duty Players. At the 2015 Call of Duty Championship for instance over US$1 million dollars in prizes are given away.
The online gaming rabbit hole goes very deep, true hackers have become pretty rare as the new ability to add Mods becomes the next illegal play. Hackers seem to become famous and relentless, I spoke earlier to a gamer in Johannesburg who owns a Youtube chanel called JoziUnderground which he uses to record and share the videos of his Call of Duty tournaments.
His experiences from starting small and local tournaments seemed to be a scene out of a school yard overrun with bullies. Players known as modders, who install online steroids onto their PlayStations and then ruin the fun for everyone, are a source of particular vitriol. He spoke of a hacker called Milkshake Mods in one of his videos, see below.
Milkshake Mods is apparently involved with a group called Nastymods, which managed to DDoS poor JoziUnderground. In simple terms that means it stole JoziUnderground’s IP address and information through the Playstation network and sent what is basically a surge of Internet that fried JoziUndergrund’s internet line. Telkom had to reset everything and start Jozi’s connection all over again.
One week later, an internet surge comes knocking at JoziUnderground’s internet connection (surprise surprise) and once again his connection goes down in flaming codes and glory. I believe JoziUnderground managed to talk his way out of the targeted attacks through some of his network buddies that will remain nameless. The player is now playing on thin ice, shall we say.
Players have been caught with illegal software, doing things that they aren’t supposed to be able to do and getting penalized severely and apologizing publicly in the way that professional sportsmen do when they get caught doing something illegal off or on the field.
