MMO Glitches / Sploits

Tons of EQ exploits but a couple that were a bit more unique/possibly not known about:

One day I'm doing who knows what when I read some interesting shit on the serverwide shaman channel (thecrucible). I think LoY just launched that day, and someone had found out that a mob in Gukta ("revamped" Grobb) was totally messed up. So I run over there and find the NPC in question: a troll slave in some cage by the bank. Every time you killed this mob, it would give you a ridiculous amount of exp. I think pretty quickly there was a shaman on every single server farming this guy, and a few hours later the servers came down for an emergency patch, which fixed it. Still got quite a bit of AAs over those couple hours. It was so random I had to wonder if that was an accident or not.

A few years later I came back to EQ to play on The Sleeper progression server. I was playing on a laptop at this time and as I was running through Burning Woods I started running at warp speed. We're talking several times faster than Selos. And that wasn't all - my game was actually sped up in relation to the server. I could chain cast nukes like an uzi. I could melee at like 10000% haste. I did some research to try to find out why this was happening, and discovered that it was linked to the power saving feature of my laptop. With this knowledge I was able to turn on "warpspeed" mode whenever I felt like it. However, I never abused this as much as I probably should have since I expected it was probably pretty easy for GMs to figure out and ban me for it. I later find out that a lot of my guildies were warping directly to BoT tower nameds to farm loot and all kinds of other crazy shit without getting banned.

This next one was a lot more known, since a lot of people were using it when it was a thing. I also did this on The Sleeper so it's circa 2007, however I have no idea how long this exploit was in the game. I used it for months on The Sleeper and don't remember it every getting fixed while I was playing. This exploit was pet pulling, and the way it worked was this: when an NPC is aggroed it generally keeps firing off a "shout for help" ability which is what causes passive mobs to aggro on you. However, if a pet conned green TO the mob it attacked (and got initial aggro), the NPC would never shout for help at all while that pet was still alive.

This was especially relevant in Chardok during the progression servers. I grinded Chardok faction so I could run around the zone and then find named mobs pretty easily. I would summon a low level pet, /pet attack the named, /pet back off, and then jump in and start fighting. This allowed me to murder any mob I wanted without anything nearby ever assisting. It was absolutely trivial to pull a mob like King Bathezid to the zone-in. I made a lot of plat early on doing this.

The Sleeper event in Sleeper's Tomb was also really broken back then. Our guild did the standard thing of leaving 1 warder up so we didn't trigger the event and nerf the zone. When we were done with Sleeper's Tomb we killed all 4 warders to experience the event, Kerafyrm spawned and murdered us all as expected. However, a friend of mine ventured back into the zone about a month later and discovered that the warders were still there. From this point on a group of us would secretly farm the warders and sell shit like gnome illusion masks and scepters of destruction for ludicrous amounts of plat. We eventually got so rich there was no point in farming the stuff anymore.

nasonex_sl said:

in vanilla WoW I was duoing with a friend. We did a Priest/Warlock combo. We discovered that I could resurrect his sacrificed demons if we timed it. We did alot of grinding with him having VW pet out and the bonus for saccing it (I think it was 3% hp regen every 4 seconds)

not a big exploit but it made things easier.

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That glitch was extremely useful in raids with a Succubus. I think you got like +10% dmg from sacrificing and +15% shadow from having her out, or something similar to that. Used to do that all the time on my lock.

Yeah, iirc warlock engineers could shock the succu back to life after the sac.

Thought of a couple more.

WoW: Me and my friends dubbed this activity, "Pirates". I discovered a fun way to troll people on my (horde) warlock during WOTLK. I would fly onto the rafters of the alliance ship that travelled between Stormwind and Borean Tundra, and wait for alliance to board the ship. I'd wait until we zoned into Stormwind, and then I'd unleash death from above. I could kill 4-5 people NP because they never expected it, and they couldn't really reach me since you couldn't fly in vanilla WoW at the time. The best part was that the graveyard was so far that they couldn't make it back to their bodies before the boat zoned, and so it would rez them in Borean Tundra and I would usually smoke them again. Rinse/repeat as long as I could, but usually people could make it back in Borean before the boat zoned to SW again. Most just abandoned ship.

EQ: In Qeynos I could make the monk guild fight with basically any faction in the zone.
Step 1: get on a lvl 1 mnk, get a SoW, and make that Tomer Insigle(sp?) guy your pet by saying I will take you to lashun
step 2: tag a monk GM and run like hell, I usually took them to the pally guild.
step 3: hit a pally GM while the monk GM and tomer are nearby, Tomer assists you (even though you're dead now), he dies, and then the monk GM assists Tomer.
It was kinda fun, and if you landed any dmg on the GMs you got the full loot/xp. the GMs usually dropped various headbands/sashes.

Eve online : Dread guristas nihilist, low sec spawn.
Check belts, find a DG nihilist, kill him, check loot, let his escort alive ... wait 21 mins, DG nihilist pops again. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. Been fixed 2 years ago. Ah those sweet and easy dg invuln
Worked only if the dg was a destroyer class ship.

Long time lurker...

I was a Bard during Luclin / PoP era EQ and the entire class was a Glitch / Exploit / Carpal tunnel inducing and basically a lot of work to play.

In Griegs End (I think) there was some midrange boss behind a locked door. I'd push right into it, and use my Singing Steel helm to cast Eye of Zomm which would sometimes pass through the door, with that you could target the mob and while the Eye was still active cast a non damaging agro song (slow or such). It would then come charging at you, open the door and easy pickings without camping keys.

In Umbral Plains, I'd routinely drag Rumblecrush across the entire zone past god knows how many mobs and drop it at the tunnel / zone in for the guild to kill.

In Fungus Grove there was an event where you could get a fast clicky invis item, I learnt to Swarm Kite there - which was borderline exploiting (but still took some skill). Some other Bards were kiting entire zones.

I used to kill Phinegal the fish every time he was up for a month or two, mostly MQing the epic bits with friends or randoms that needed them, easy enough kill as you could mez him and heal up then hit him a bit more.

I pulled a lot of stuff for the guild, particularly linked mobs that could be snared. A lot of bosses of that era would run straight back to the spawn with their guards as soon as they lost agro, I guess to stop FD pulling. SK snares had a DOT component, so the agro never got properly wiped - but as a Bard you could pull a few - run fast and snare one then Fade. The others would instantly run straight back home, but the snared one couldn't. Once the guards got back to their spawn point it was easy to tag the other for a solo pull. Used to do that on Vallon or Tallon (whichever didn't have the bow). Most of those kind of pulls took quite a few fades to pull off, so it was kind of self limiting as it took like an hour to get all of the Mana back and if you died on the pull you were OOM.

There was a thing with Song of Highsun and the Ring War also.

Here's a short lived and minor one I remember from WoW.

For a time in burning crusade, they introduced a talent in the holy tree, for priests, that would grant you a mana-free, instant cast, heal if your smite landed a crit. Or something like that. However, you could cast prayer of healing instantly and for no mana, and if any of your heals landed a crit, it would refresh the bonus, so you could insta-cast again, for no mana. I stacked a bunch of spell crit gear and would just chain cast prayer of healing on every GCD. Having a 45% crit chance with buffs... can't remember really, meant I could string a bunch of these together before having the buff fall off. I am not certain but I think the group heal had a higher chance of getting the buff to go off as well. Not sure if it was calculating each party member it was cast on individually or what.

Anyways, It wasn't very useful in situations where I couldn't heal through the damage, as the amount of agro I generated basically made me the tank as well. But it was lots of fun facerolling heroics as I turned my group into a giant ball of healing light.

P.S.

Back in Vanilla WoW, I was really good at climbing weird geometry. Sticking to walls, and shimmying up corners, ect. I forget all of the weird places I managed to get to. Under Stormwind, Behind Greymane's wall before there was anything there, On top of the roofs in Ogrimar ect. My friends were not as capable or coordinated as me. So as a priest I would duel them, then mind control them, then get them to climb up into these weird spots until mind control broke, then I would follow them and repeat.

One neat application for my talents was in Zul Gurub. You could get up onto the walls and hills that surrounded the zone. From there you could basically get to any point in the zone you wanted. The only practical application of this was to access Zanza the Restless without having to clear the zone of trash mobs. It didn't happen to often, but it was a really handy trick to help guild mates who were ready for their shoulder enchants, but didn't want to wait till the next week to get them.

EQ1

Back in the day where all of the trade happened in east commons there was this glitch with trading items. If you asked a player to show you all their bags 6 in all, then asked the player to show you a piece of their gear. When you clicked cancel, the bags would go back into their inventory but put a priority over the gear and that 6th slot would be the piece of gear they took off. The 6th bag would then fall to the ground for a swift pickup.

I tried this once or twice, but felt guilty about scamming so I stopped. Did get a bag full of blue diamonds once...

Its been a long time so I forget what I posted in the FoH sploits thread but I do remember this MQ fun:

Make a group with a single lvl 1 noob as the 6th.
Get an Anguish instance, make the lvl 1 the raid/quest leader.
Zone in, leave the raid.
Lock ourselves in the zone to avoid getting booted out.
Ghost Kill everything with some lvl 70/1500 aa'd monks for the loot, augs and epic2 items.
Unlock and leave.
Delete the lvl 1 noob.
Rinse and repeat.

We did something like a year and half of Anguish raids with the loot going to the four of us and all our alts in about a week.

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Afk Killing.
Get a Hive instance.
Run a GK script that just killed everything within a certain radius (most of the zone, the Orcs had a damage shield I think).
Meanwhile, use another plugin that allowed anyone else to warp with the GK'er.
Max level and AA's for everyone.
I died once, and GK was still running, I was hopping all over the guild hall with tells like 'rofl what the hell are you doing'. Never got busted!

Afk Killing II
Get a... whatever that giant roaming robot was, zone instance.
Clear a packed room.
Run the MT around the room, past all the spawn points, while recording the path.
Everyone runs their macros/plugins.
The MT runs around that packed spawn room till aggroed, runs back to camp where the macro running group kills with perfect precision.
Max lvl/aa again! I think it was lvl 80 then.
If the Zone_ID changed from dying (or if the instance eventually shut down), we would automatically camp out. Worked most of the time unless a wolf ate you while camping. Doesn't matter it was all a net gain.

Waking up for work one morning I checked in to see how it was going. Just as I did, a GM popped in, probably wondering why the instance was still up after 8 hours. He looks at what we are doing for a minute or two, makes us all Gnomes and just left. Whew!

We all connected to a central MQ2 EQ Bot Command Server so you could make anyone do anything so I could have told all chars to stop their macros and camp anyhow.

At that point in the game we couldn't play anymore (after PoP sucked) but MQ really breathed some life into things with that new toolset.

e: minor details from the foggy past.

Not a long or interesting story really, but in vanilla wow (a little before AQ came out) I figured out that you could use a macro to spam summon the disgusting oozeling pet, which afflicted you with a debuff that did nothing, and it would remove all effects from your character. So, when our guild made it C'Thun, when I was summoned into his stomach, I would use the macro to remove all of the acid stacks and this led to a server first and incredibly easy kill of C'Thun. It also was ridiculous in PVP for obvious reasons. Didn't take too long for it to get patched out after that.

Dandai_sl said:

What was the name of your guild? I remember my best friend (I think his mage's name was Figg?) farming the shit out of those oozes for that pet for C'thun. For the life of me I can't remember the name of his guild though.

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It was BBZ on Laughing Skull. It very well could have been us, we certainly farmed the hell out of them.

One more I just remembered. In EQ there was a maximum number of mobs which could be attacking you at one time--maybe 8? Get 8 snakes, rats, etc to attack you at once. While they are attacking you, other mobs will not engage. If you're a spellcaster, you could nuke a high-level mob and it would just stand there and not retaliate.

This actually wasn't super useful because EQ had the mobs disengage if they hadn't caused damage in X minutes. If one of the low-level mobs moved away, then the high-level mob would start attacking you. It wasn't that efficient from an XP standpoint, but it was useful when I needed to kill a guard or something which would have normally been too tough for me.

City of hero's = had an invuln spine jumper. I would jump from pack to pack to pack, after a min or so I'd have the whole zone then I would jump into a crate or someplace small. The entire zone would jump on me and die. I would get a level or 2 per pull. I posted about it after I leveled and I got something like 20k views (had pictures in there) and then it was fixed to where mobs would only go so far from their spawn point.

Both of the exploits work off of modem disconnecting. Premise is you run into a wall then disconnect your modem, and the game would allow you to run through walls, or explore areas.

in EQ 1 I would duo vox with a druid by moving inside the wall, and trapping her so she couldn't cast or move. Then we would modem disconnect again to pass through the wall and collect the loot. We had to evac fast enough so the Giants wouldn't get us.

Then we sold the loot on Ebay for a shitload. This was super early EQ. They really didn't fix this for awhile, we did it in Kunark to duo in Seb in that area where you needed a rogue to pick the lock.
There was also some drop disarm tricks you could do to get no drop items to other players.

We did a shitload of modem disconnecting on the pvp servers as well because it would make your pet into a raid boss basically.

on EQ 2 ,same thing we would open all locked doors that you needed keys for by phasing through them. This allowed us to get items really quickly ,and bypass a good bit of content.

Dandai_sl said:

Wow, I had no idea that was ever a thing. Rough guess at how many minutes were in "X minutes?"

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I'm thinking it was around 10 minutes or so.