Chapter 1 - March 5, 2002

      Well, where to start, hacking... it's an extremely versatile word, the media has completely remade the word to have a new meaning for a good sound byte. I’m not going to go into the ethics of hacking or cracking or whatnot, I just felt I should make a short documentary of the “hacking” of Ragnarok. As a note, this document has been updated and edited many times to fix mistakes and continue the record of this subject.

      Back in the good old alpha days, there were some true hacks, like the zeny hack and stuff, that really worked well and made the game a breeze to cheat at, most people here were not involved in alpha, so I’ll just jump ahead to beta.

      From the day beta came out there have been major bugs and flaws in the server. I remember the very first day of the game, I had gotten my character to level 9, one of the first characters with a job on the server, and then walked over to east Prontera field, and suddenly I was stuck in a map with no way out and no monsters -.- *see screenshot 2*. Anyways, also on that first day, or maybe second, the first hack was already released, the “speed hack”. Gravity fixed it VERY fast, and from then on there weren’t any real big hacks released for quite a while except for the following: the autopot program that automatically started using pots FOR you when you got too low on health, Arsenic’s name spoofer which allowed you to display any name you wanted while talking, no censorship of words, it bypassed the anti-flood, and it allowed illegal ASCII characters. There was also twintop’s programs: the monster database and a “quick patch downloader”, the latter never really caught on cause it didn’t work ^_^ but a lot of people still use the monster database.

      Then, Arsenic came into the Ragnarok communities view with his ArseKit. It patched a few bytes in the Ragnarok exe *changing some assembly code* to do 3 things, make you never disconnect (ignore the speed hack disconnect packet), allow you to run 2 Ragnarok instances (not same account), and Bypass the patch client. Now, one day sometime in January, I think, someone put up an external exp viewer that worked for patch 45 only (I think), and I thought to myself “FINALLY! I’ve been wanting to see my exp progress for so long now.” And then patch 46 was out a few hours later ^_^ and it no longer worked. By the way, this viewer was actually made for the Korean server, but worked for ours. This viewer only read 6 ram values (well, 24 if you want to be technical since the values are stored in 4 bytes) and reported them in an external window to Ragnarok, extremely harmless. So right when it stopped working, I decided to jump in and make my own, so I did, and had it released the next day as an external viewer on ro-world.com. For a while I just updated it every patch, and I started working on an internal viewer to Ragnarok, using the exact same method, but instead using directx to blit the text to its window, it didn’t work well. At about this time Ro-world closed down and I moved to pak0. I was allowed to post about it and advertise and everything. Thinking back to Arsenic’s ArseKit, I realized that patching the assembly code would be so much better, and faster in the end, so I set out on my task to finish it before arsenic (I kinda mentioned my idea and he tried to beat me too it ^_^). Well, I finished mine first *BARELY* and released it on the pak0 boards. Now at this time, there was no paranoia or anything pertaining to external programs that interacted with the RagExe.exe, and even the mods accepted it and allowed me to post it, advertise it, and eventually Meph even stickied one of the topics! Well anyways, one of the earlier threads can be found below under “Original Exp Thread” and the sticked thread which was deleted can be found under “Big Exp thread”. Anyways, back to the story. Arsenic finished his and released it, but it wasn’t very widely distributed because it wasn’t very user friendly. To see how much exp you had or gained, you had to type something or move your mouse over your exp bar and wait, which was a pain ^_^.

      I forget where, but I think it was somewhere around here that Item_Collector came in with his auto overcharge script, that I thought was a brilliant idea. What it did was, after a person dealt him and put all their items in the window and pressed ok, it calculated 10% over what they could sell it to an NPC for, and bought it from them, and his script then sold it to an NPC next with his OC (which was only like 17%, he wasn't REALLY into it that much for the money.) I think gravity should have allowed this as long as it was kept under control, he was a very good and honest person, but they told him not to use it, and he didn't.

      At this time, there was a bug on the service dubbed “the ghost bug” that made characters stay on Ragnarok even after they quit, gravity blamed this on Arsenics “no disconnect patch” on the ArseKit, but it was obvious they were wrong, and later, it was shown that they were wrong when they found the problem ON THEIR SIDE and fixed it. This is when the real no external programs “revolution” started. Shortly after he also released his new last point program, which didn’t receive much attention *yet*, but as you will soon find out, it did very soon. After this is when the bad stuff started happening. I decided to quit because I was tired of all the bad people in Ragnarok. You can see my goodbye post in the “Big Exp Thread” on page 17. Very soon after this, the bot was released with the sex bug. So let me explain what happened there. The bot is just an emulator of Ragnarok that receives packets, interprets them, decides what to do, and sends out new packets to the Ragnarok server. One of the parts of one of the packets that gets sent to everyone is the users sex (0 for female, 1 for male – according to Arsenic, I thought it was the other way around) and the bot sent out “2”, and everyone that came within the vicinity of the bot was crashed. Any value above 1 was making the clients crash because it made a pointer to graphics that didn’t exist. Right when I heard about this I came back to help out if possible, I was going to release something so the user wouldn’t crash when they encountered a bot, it was at this point that ixga.com and pak0 took their new stance on hacks, which can be seen under “No more Hacks+Timeline”. This aggravated me so I decided not to try and help out, also under “No more Hacks+Timeline”. I later found out a way to crash the bots with a buffer overflow, but I never released it for the same reason.

      The next day, Arsenic and ArtFortz (creator of the bot) both released “hacks” so you wouldn’t crash when encountering a bot with the sex set to 2 or above. But it didn’t matter, the no hack talk law was upheld and not many people found out about them. Arsenic then also released the “crasher” which exploited the sex=2 bug without the bot. After this went on for a while and everyone was in low spirits and very mad about not even getting to play RO because of DoS (Denial of Service) bots, gravity FINALLY fixed it so the sex bug could no longer crash anyone else. At this point in time, a new bug started occurring in which people would get stuck in a wall after using an acolyte’s teleport. Gravity asked you to email them so they could fix you, but this often took way to long, and Arsenic’s last point program fixed it instantly. The community was split on hacks. Some said don’t use any (a message that’s been around for a long time), and some said use only “good ones”. This is where Insante came in and started his freedom of speech pleas, which was good at first, but a little too forceful and caused a lot of problems, you can see one of the earlier ones under “The start of Insante’s pleas”. At this point I pretty much dropped out of the scene, I don’t think anything big happened in that time. I came back a little under 2 months later and made my last statement (I believed at the time) I will be making to anyone anywhere until Final comes out and it is pay to play, you can see it under “My Final Good Bye”.

      One last problem that has been occurring lately is the problem of hacked accounts. They are usually stolen through Trojans and stupidity. A Trojan is a program that hides itself in a seemingly legitimate program and does something bad (like send someone your username and password), and stupidity involves someone else claiming they are gravity in the game and asking for your name and password ^_^. Artfortz’s bot had something he added into it to make it send the username and password to a character in the game, it was something that made a large number of people lose their accounts, as well as a completely stupid program called ragboost.exe that doesn’t do what it advertises, just sends the username and password that is entered to the creator, see the picture “Ragboost screenshot” below. There was also talk of a “chat room hack” that gives someone your password if you go into their chat room, but I believe these claims to be false, DarkSide had investigated it for me, and I trust his judgment. I tend to not believe gravity too much especially after they blamed Arsenic for the ghost bug problem.

      I have decided to include TheGleek in this after all. TheGleek is a website that has been around for a while (and the creator of the website’s handle) that supported everything that could be considered evil in the game. It was the main distributor of bad hacks, and the community atmosphere pushed scamming, stealing accounts, looting, lying, cheating, and so on. It was overall, in my opinion, a bunch of immature script kiddies idolizing a few people that made the hacks, and trying to ruin the game for everyone else, finding as many ways as they could to cheat. Some of his immaturity can be seen below under “TheGleek’s Fake Goodbye” which he made on April Fools day, hopefully, this will actually happen in the near future. Anyways, that’s pretty much the history of the hacking of Ragnarok, as I know it, if I have made any mistakes, please tell DarkSide for me and I will check up on them and change this accordingly.

Chapter 2: 4/17/02

      Well, it has been over 2 months since I quit, and have decided to join back in for a while because the server has been moved to the USA, which should, in theory, eliminate the larger part of lag and problems that we’ve had. I know I said I wasn’t going to come back, but I figured I’d twist my words and say “I will quit Ragnarok indefinitely on the Chaos server” ^_^. A new version of the exp viewer has been released with some new options, and I had been working on some other new programs I will release sometime, but have not been able to finish them due to too many other projects and things that have come up. Some of these include an anti bot program I made a few months ago for an old version of the bot which crashes all bots in the vicinity of your character (although it seems they don't work properly on the new server, so I don't have to update it, it seems), a program which will automatically calculate OC for you, but it still has to be run while the user is there, and a fix for the small text on the japanese server. The ball is now in pak0 and ixga’s court, and we’ll see how they respond to this page and these programs. I will continually update this page to keep an accurate history, instead of trying to remember what happened and write about it months later. BTW, the new loki server is awsome so far, wonderful community and atmosphere, we'll see if it remains that way.

Chapter 3: 5/5/02

      Let's see, what's happened since last I wrote. I made and released a warp to last save point program that the user has to wait for a minute standing absolutely still to use, works for all patches of course. Bots have invaded worse then ever on Loki. A very interesting equip hack then came around that was released by Arsenic. It allowed you to equip items in any spot (7 plate males + a tsuragi ruled ^_^). This program also included a built in speed hack through equipping an item with a low "hit rate" like a hat in the left hand slot. I myself started researching the packets intensely and found many many exploits. I made a suggestions page of all this, and released a screen shot of a program that could run all these hacks, showing people what is capable right now on the servers without having to release chaos upon them, but at the same time making people realize that a malicious person with my knowledge could easily reek havoc on the servers. I have also recently made contact with a very awesome gravity representative and have given him all I know on the exploits I have found (which is most, if not every single one on the server) and how to fix them. Most of the exploits should all be fixed in a very short amount of time. Life is good ^_^

Chapter 4: 6/7/02

      To start where I left off on the last entry, LIFE SUCKS. This will be my final entry to The History of the Hacking of Ragnarok. As of today I quit the scene; I can no longer take any of gravities crap or all the crap I receive from a lot of the people in the community. View the archives page here to see all that went on. I have however been receiving a lot of positive encouragement from some people, and it always does help. I ended up giving gravity information on dozens of exploits and holes in the server and they proceeded to not only completely ignore the problems after I gave them the information, but also ended up screwing some of my good friends out of a lot money. People THEY had approached and then brushed aside.

      Some great things concerning hacking have happened including Christy (God-Poing) publicly announcing on the server and in the free BBS something to the extent of "if you get hacked, it's your own fault and we do not care." The big hack this time around was the dupe hack, which involved passing an item to someone else then rolling back your character to the last time they logged into the server. I didn't record the date, but some malicious hackers had decided to dupe millions and millions and millions worth of z in items in a period of time and dropped it all in Izlude to cause a community upset, and a server rollback. Gravity immediately took down the server, rolled back SOME of the characters that picked up items and proceeded to leave the dupe hack working when they put the server back up. After this many many more items were duped in the underground, upsetting the Ragnarok economy a lot.

      Next in line came the skill hack, which allowed you to use skills across the map. It was already discovered, but Arsenic released a program that allowed you to utilize it, which actually happened the same day I made my last entry. On another patch he re-released it to work again, with a new non-malicious hack inside of it that allowed you to rotate 360° around the screen. Bots have been as bad as ever, and I even discovered there are English bots on the Korean private beta 2, and all the holes I found/confirmed on the English/Japanese servers work on it too (the server opened last night.) Another new interesting hack that happened was the "take control of NPC" hack, which I witnessed but never did because it was done via a bot, and I don't touch bots. It could be pulled off on the Ragnarok client, but with a lot of work. I was told gravity fixed it. Another hack was a special resource hack where bots could call to invalid resources through the server and crash normal clients, I have not seen this since the 3rd day after it was first used. Joe the dude, webmaster of Eroite, and a collector / discoverer of a lot of information pertaining to Ragnarok has been on his normal rampage of how to fix the game and quitting and coming back and quitting and coming back.

      I believe the largest event that happened was at the time of E3. Gravity had screwed something up on the chaos server and every time a person relogged they were rolled back. This meant a person with a tiara could drop it, relog, drop it again, relog, drop it again, etc, creating an excess in tiaras. Of course they were never saved because people had to relog sooner or later… that is… until gravity fixed the problem without kicking all the users first. So for about 3 days (I think), before gravity rolled back, there were very rare items floating all around the chaos server. When they fixed that, they also fixed the character rollback cheat, which in turn fixed duping, and they also fixed the name hack. There may be other ways to rollback your character, but I did not delve into it. Oh yes, and gravity finally banned my account even though I was hacking per their request. That's pretty much it. I conclude not only this chapter, but the entire History of the Hacking of Ragnarok.